Abstract:
The micro-credit program was first initiated in 1976 with the promise of
providing credit to poor people without collateral, alleviating poverty and unleashing
human creativity and Endeavour of poor people. More than 65 million poor people have
accessed microcredit schemes and about three quarters of them are women. This paper
addresses the challenging issue of whether microcredit programmes are tools for
empowering poor women. The study focuses the way of empowering women income
through micro credit on poverty alleviation, self employment and health nutrition. For
this purpose the problem is identified as "To what extent micro credit influences
empowering poor women on poverty alleviation, increases health nutrition and self
employment of women". The prime objective of the research is to identify the role of
the micro-credit programmes in empowering women in Jaffna region under post-war
development. It was assumed that higher the level of micro credit positively correlated
with empowering poor women through health nutrition, poverty alleviation and self
employment. For this purpose, the households who are getting loans from micro
finance institutions i.e., CRBs, TCCSs, from Jaffna region is selected to meet the
research objectives. In Jaffna, there are 29 000 female-headed households out of the
total of 100 000 women affected by war in the district of Jaffna. There were 2000
families in 15 camps in High Security Zones in Jaffna, families that used to be in the
middle class bracket before the war. In a post-war economy, a country like Sri Lanka
will need to address multifaceted socioeconomic issues in respect of women affected by
war. From more than 1,000 households, 10% of sample in Jaffna region are used to
survey the results. The information has been gathered by using primary and secondary
data. Finally, it is concluded that there is need to complement credit-delivery with
social awareness raising, building confidence and self-esteem among women.
Microcredit, thus, is not sufficient in the process of empowering income poor women,
but it is of the very important ingredients in that process.
