IMPACT OF GRAMEEN BANK MICRO CREDIT ON WOMEN BENEFICIARIES

Abstract

Grameen Bank (GB) is one of the largest NGO working with the socio-economic upliftment of the poor section specially women of the society. The main focus on the present study is to determine impact of GB on women beneficiaries through change in livelihood status as well as to explore the change in decision making ability of women beneficiaries of GB in twenty selected centers of Jaforgonj north of Debidwar branch under Comilla district. The specific objective were: to determine the selected characteristics of rural women, to explore the relationship between the selected characteristics of rural women and impact of Grameen bank, to assess the change in decision making ability after involving with micro-credit programme of GB and to identify the problems faced by the beneficiaries. Eleven selected characteristics of the women were described, which includes, age, educational qualification, family size, family farm size, family income, credit availability, organizational participation, communication with GB employee and staff, non-localite behavior, attitude towards community, and attitude towards micro-credit programme of GB with dependant variable impact of GB micro credit programme on women beneficiaries. The results of t-test on change pattern of livelihood status in three dimension namely 'change in farm and household materials', 'change in annual family income' and 'changing of housing, health and sanitation' in terms of 'before' and 'after' involvement with Grameen bank micro-credit programme, were found significant. Null hypotheses were tested to explore the relationships between eleven independent variables and change in livelihood status. Seven null hypotheses out of 11 null hypotheses were rejected. Among these, education, family annual income, credit availability, communication with GB employee and staff and attitude towards micro-credit program of GB were positively significant and only age and non-localite behavior were negatively significant. On the other hand family size, family farm size, organizational participation and attitude towards community did not show any significant relationship with change in livelihood status. In case of change in decision making ability, the computed t-value was highly significant, this implied that the GB beneficiaries had better opportunity to improve their decision making ability. Data also indicated that the problem faced by the beneficiaries of GB in respect of 'lack of sufficient amount of credit' was the most serious problems with problem index of 242, credit disbursement is delayed due to linger process was the second problem with problem index 234 and the third problem was 'religious belief' with problem index 199 among the six existing problems.