Microfinance for women’s empowerment: evidence from Apeiron’s project Equal Steps

Women’s empowerment is an active and multidimensional process, aiming at enabling women to realise their full identity and power in all spheres of life. Women’s empowerment and economic development are closely connected. Microfinance aims to support sustainable development, social welfare and progress, including women’s empowerment. This paper reviews whether microfinance can be an effective tool for women’s empowerment and tests this hypothesis through a research study in Nepal based on a case from Apeiron’s practice. The analysis shows how microfinance, when providing both financial and non-financial services, called ‘credit-plus’, can enhance women’s empowerment; however, a whole process of interventions in various spheres and a wider structural change are needed to achieve women’s empowerment and gender equality. Local projects based on ‘transformatory’ and a bottom-up approach might achieve this goal.