Tapping Rural Women Entrepreneurship Through Self-Help Micro-Credit

The chapter reveals that women's role in enterprise and household decision making, their access to assets, and control over self-earnings have improved significantly among client and non-client groups. Self-help credit program (SHCP) has facilitated them to make decisions for their personal needs, availing treatment, recreational facilities, and participate independently in household decision making. However, SHCP should incorporate necessary steps to enhance empowerment of women irrespective of their duration in program, types of economic activities, and marital status. In order to transform SHCP into a genuine livelihood diversification and gender strategy, women's empowerment needs to be understood as more than a marginal increase in access to income, and/or consultation in limited areas of enterprise and household decision making and/or occasional meetings with a small group of other women.