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Microfinance and The Empowerment of Women "A self-sustainable approach towards gender equality"
(2020)
Women have always been a victim of injustice, inequality, and the domination of men all over the world and still today, women are being deprived of developmental, financial or educational opportunities.
The empowerment of women is one of the most challenging goals the world is trying to achieve in terms of development.
The goal of this thesis is to give an overview of the role of microfinance in the empowerment of women, discover whether microfinance is a self-sustainable approach towards gender equality and examine how microfinance institutions are able to provide financial services to people, who are defined as unbankable by commercial banks.
Therefore, the business concepts of microfinance institutions, as well as their impacts on borrowers, especially women, are analyzed by taking a qualitative secondary data approach.
The results show that MFIs can successfully substitute financially valuable collateral by issuing loans to interdependent borrowing groups.
Furthermore, microfinance shows significant positive impacts on the financial and non-financial empowerment of women, although they are facing tough challenges to get access to women in patriarchal structures, targeting the poorest of the poor and still remain self-sustainable.
Successful examples, such as the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh show the possibilities of microfinance.
However, further research has to be conducted regarding the customer base of successful MFIs, that do not have to rely on external financial aid.
Analyzing the customer base can verify that those MFIs are not just successful because their target group shifted to wealthier borrowers, demanding higher loan amounts. Though customer data is confidential and therefore challenging to access.
Fort he past decades Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) in Cameroon and the world over has been growing. Despite the restructuring of the Cameroon Banking sector after the Bank crisis that erupted in the late 1980`s, MFIs in Cameroon continue to grow and offering financial products and services to the unbanked population not served by commercial banks. The main objective of this research is to critically examine and analyse the factors responsible for the growth of MFIs in Cameroon in comparable to commercial banks and a recommendation on what need to be done to improve on the financial sector of Cameroon. The research method is an explorative approach base on empirical literature review. The research will examine social and financial performance factors that have been responsible for the emerging growth of MFIs in other developing countries in Africa Asia, Latin America and apply them to MFIs in Cameroon in order to find out if these same factors can also be responsible for the emerging growth of MFIs in Cameroon. At the end of this research study it was revealed that social performance factors which includes total number of clients served that measured the breadth of outreach,the poverty level of the clients which measured the depth of outreach, the total number of branches and products and services which measured the scope of outreach has been responsible for the emerging growth of microfinance institutions in Cameroon.
Key words: performance factors, Microfinance institutions,Commercial banks, Cameroon