Micro-Finance as a Veritable Tool for Gender Economic Empowerment in Nigeria

Abstract

Microfinance is hailed as a tool for poverty alleviation and is one of the major strategies to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This is because access to financial services assists poor households in meeting their basic financial needs, protects them against risks, and reduces their vulnerability to shocks, by building assets. Prof Mohammed Yunus of Bangladesh developed a framework for Microfinance approach to community development with a pilot group lending scheme for the landless people and this later became the Gramin Bank which currently serves more than 2.4 million clients out of which about 94% of them are women, and has become a model for many countries (Anon. 2011). Countries like Nigeria also adopted this approach. Indeed, according to the CBN (2005), "microfinance is about providing financial services to the poor who are traditionally not served by the conventional financial institutions. This paperexamines the phenomenon of Microfinance, its potentials tohelp, women to turn their savings into sums large enough to satisfy a wide range of business, consumption, personal, social, and asset-building needs .This paper relied heavily on the secondary sources of data for all the information needed. It equally used the empowerment strategy asthe theoretical framework of analysis.This paper recommendsthat Women in the rural communities form the central targets of microfinance, therefore formal and informal microfinance institutions should be established in the rural areas since the microfinance banking is actually for the rural poor. Access to microfinance can help rural self-employed women to expand their businesses and improve their personal and family well-being and Women should be encouraged to open bank accounts, so that they can get use to financial servicesetc.