Women Empowerment Through Microfinance: Empirical Evidence from Ghana

Microfinance programmes are currently promoted as a key strategy for simultaneously addressing both women empowerment and poverty alleviation in Ghana. However, there has been a hot debate on the potency of microfinance in empowering the Ghanaian women. Apparently, this research was conducted to analyse the impact of microfinance services on the economic and social empowerment of women in Ghana. A purposive non-probability sampling technique was utilized in a 500 sample-size selection of female microfinance customers from Ashanti, Greater Accra, Central, Eastern and Western Regions of Ghana (100 from each region). For this study, SPSS and STATA Statistical tools were used to analyze the data and the ordered probit model was used as the estimation model. Glaring in this study is a statistically significant positive relationship between microfinance and women empowerment, for both economic and social but such relationship is dependent on marital status and educational level of the women with age having no controlling effect. Nevertheless, it is also evident in this study that women encounter myriad problems in accessing microfinance services of which high interest rate is paramount. Recommendations have been given on how microfinance outreach programmes could be enriched especially among the rural women since enhanced microfinance accessibility could be a perfect tool to accelerate economic and social empowerment of women in Ghana.