The Impact of Microfinance in the Development of Micro and Small Enterprises Owned by Women: A Case Study of Vision Fund Malawi

Abstract

The major focus of this paper was to assess the impact of Microfinance in the development of micro and small enterprises owned by women. Microfinance plays a crucial role in socio-economic empowerment of women by promoting suitable conditions for them to move from positions of marginalization within households, to one of greater roles in decision-making at the community, national and international levels. Microfinance for women and the poor has received extensive recognition as a strategy for poverty reduction and for economic empowerment. Despite this, there is a clear lack of recorded data on the impact of micro-finance in the development of micro and small enterprises owned by women. Research design for this study was both qualitative and quantitative, which involved conducting focus group discussions and questionnaires as research instruments in order to collect qualitative and quantitative data respectively from a sample size of 60 with the use of convenient sampling. The qualitative data from these focus group discussions was analyzed using content-based analysis while the quantitative data will be analyzed using SPSS. The findings show that the most common services being provided by Vision Fund Malawi (VFM) are Microloans and Savings. It was found that services such microinsurance and trainings are not known by the majority of respondents particularly the non-VFM staff.