Microfinance Livelihood Initiatives and Women Empowerment in Selected Villages of Andhra Pradesh

Developing countries have large number of their population living below poverty line. Therefore, it becomes imperative to formulate situation-specific poverty alleviation policies and programmes to generate a minimum level of income for rural poor, who form a substantial percentage of national population in developing societies. In India, the Central and State governments initiated several programmes to eradicate poverty. Provision of microfinance is one such programme which gained importance in recent times. This programme has fully involved the SHGs (Self-Help Groups). Microfinance system can only supplement the role of banks and financial institutions to alleviate poverty and unemployment in the country. In this process, the Central and State governments introduced several women-specific schemes to empower them in general and rural women in particular. In this connection there is a need to study the impact of microfinance on rural women, whether the benefits of this developmental programme have percolated down or not, particularly at micro level. This paper is an attempt to assess the impact of microfinance on the changes in the level of income and employment of members after joining the SHGs at micro level. To fulfill the above objective, six villages in the three regions (Coastal Andhra, Rayalaseema and Telangana) of former united Andhra Pradesh were taken up for an in-depth study. The major findings of the study are: (i) microfinance activities have altered the living condition of the SHG members, (ii) these activities have also contributed to social empowerment of women.