Role of Microfinance on the Empowerment of Poor Women Living in Kolkata

Women Empowerment plays the key role in sustainable development. Kabeer (1999) defines empowerment 'as the expansion in people's ability to make strategic life choices in a context where this ability was previously denied to them'. Thus women empowerment implies enhancing capabilities and entitlements so that poor women can access better living conditions, improved health and education status, greater autonomy in decision-making and fulfillment of their roles as wives, mothers and workers under non-oppressive conditions. There has been much debate about the way of achieving women empowerment. Microfinance, as an alternative source of financial assistance for the poor (especially for women) has received wide attention in the recent years owing to its contribution to women empowerment. The assumption is that with increasing access to microfinance women will be enable to make their own decisions about credit, savings and setting- up micro-enterprises with increasing control over their income. Greater controls over financial resources enable women to make a greater contribution to household income which increases household well-being and the well-being of themselves. But how many dimensions can be fulfilled by microfinance as it has multi-dimensional approach? With an empirical study in Kolkata Municipal Corporation Area, this paper tries answer these questions.