A Study on Self-help Group based Microfinance Impacting Poor Rural Households

This paper examines empirically the impact of Self-help Group based microfinance on the socio-economic characters like income, employment, literacy and migration of the rural households of Orissa state of India. An attempt is made to carry out a quantitative study to supplement a large number of past qualitative researches, and to findout how Self-help microfinance programs impact households under different livelihood portfolios. A multi-stage stratified random sampling is employed and data collection is made through structured household schedules. Impact assessment is made by comparing a control group with the target group, and the test of significance is done through the paired t-test. Econometric models like logistic regression and probit model are used to analyse the data. The study came out with the result that the Self-help Group based microfinance has a positive impact on increasing the income, employment days and number of literate family members of the participating households; and decreased in the number of family members migrating and number of migration days. Also the Self-help Group based microfinance programmes have higher impact on households under the primary occupation of micro-enterprise & trading activity than that of the agriculture & allied activity across various household characteristics.