Poverty alleviation through the microfinance intervention: an empirical evidence from northern parts of India

Abstract

Microfinance has drawn major attention after being successful in providing financial services to poor underprivileged people globally. Microfinance is an institute that provides financial services as well as business development training to its beneficiaries. This paper is an attempt to investigate the nature of the relationship between the amount of loan size provided by microfinance institutes and its effect on the standard of living, health and education of its beneficiaries. An ex-post-facto design was implemented to analyse whether the size of loan amount predicts the above three dimensions of poverty. Analysis of variance has been done to analyse the significance of the number of years joined the microfinance program. The findings revealed a positive impact on the above three dimensions of poverty. We believe our grassroot research can benefit different government policies of poverty alleviation, non-government organisations and pro-poor microfinance organisations.