Impact of microfinance on economic empowerment of women in oromia credit and saving share company (OCSSCO) ada’a district of Oromia Region, Ethiopia

This study assesses the impacts of microfinance on women empowerment in Ada’a district, East Shoa Zone of Oromia, with main objective to examine the impact of-microfinance in promoting and raising women’s participation in the household decision making capacity, and improving women’s income and asset ownership. From all women borrowers whose activities are mainly connected to different services, 132 women randomly selected and completed the questionnaire. In addition, some key informants were interviewed from the institution. The result shows that income and household decision making capability of the existing clients has improved better than the new clients. The binary logistic regression result shows that Land ownership, Individual Savings, Mobility, and working outside home significantly affect the cumulative women empowerment. This indicated that getting access to microfinance credit services enables women in Ethiopia to get economic empowerment by getting freedom of mobility to run their business activities, generating their own income, owning different assets such as land and working outside of their homes. Thus, it is recommended that proper-implementation of the company’s loan policy that particularly advances credit to women-and the poor. Microfinance institutions need to promote adequate pre-loan trainings and cooperative works of the institution, and conduct strong and consistent post credit supervision/follow up/ to succeed in their objective of reaching the poorest of the poor and women. Women clients will also get more income as they get larger credit for initial capital to start profitable and sustainable business since the current amount of loan advanced to them is too small to start business.