Impact of Micro Loan on Women’s Livelihood: Evidence from Manmunai North Division, Batticaloa

Microcredit  is  a  broad  term  that  includes  deposits,  credits  and payment  services  to  the  poor.  In  Batticaloa  district  the  number  of Micro Loan institutions have increased significantly especially in this last decade. This research is carried out with a main objective to find out  the  impact  of  micro  loan  on  women’s  livelihood  in  Manmunai North  division  of  Batticaloa  district.  In  this  study,  a  sample  of  150 women  from  Manmunai  North  division  who  have  been  engaged  in microfinance activities for at least 5 years. In this study, we considered Microcredit as an independent variable and Livelihood as a dependent variable.  There are four independent variables as repayment, lending, interest rate, time and four dependent variables as poverty, education, saving, family size which are used to examine the percentage analysis on the basic background of women’s livelihood. The study has covered primary data and analyzed the data by women’s descriptive statistics, correlation   and   regression   models.   Correlation   and  regression analysis  is  used  to  find  out  the  relationship  and  strength  between microcredit  and  women  livelihood.  According  to  the  results  of regression coefficient it presented the specification of four variables (lending,  repayment,  interest  rate,  time)  and  reveled  the  ability  to predict decision-making (R2=0.164). The respective R2 value is 0.164 denotes that 16% of the observed variability in women’s livelihood can be  explained  by  the  differences  in  all  independent  variables.  The finding of the research is both variables have a positive coefficient, which  means  microcredit  increases  with  the  increasing  level  of interest rate and repayment.