Empowering women through micro finance in sikkim: an impact analysis

With growing importance of making society equitable, the women empowerment plays a pivotal role in this regard. In India due to women’s higher ratio of unemployment then men, women are still undervalued. According to World Bank report it confirms that women’s have a higher level of unemployment which at macro level found that 70 % of the world’s poor are women. Sikkim is the north eastern state of India, which has four districts east, north, south and west and is surrounded by three countries Tibet, china and Bhutan. It being the Himalayan area is lacking behind the banking sector due to hard to reach areas where people in rural areas still cannot access the financial services. Women here, especially in rural areas are very hardworking but besides being so hardworking due to lack of opportunity and knowledge it has higher rate of poverty. Micro financing is one such intervention that aims at reduction of poverty by providing basic financial services to the underserved section of the society at affordable terms. One of the important objective & the effort of the government here is to ease the credit constraint of households or to provide them with capital to initiate an activity, thereby increasing their income and consumption. Micro financing or microcredit programmes aims the poor, especially women, to engage them in income-generating activities.
An attempt has been made in this paper to focuses on the determinants of microfinance programme, its impact towards empowering women in Sikkim, India.