Impact of microfinance on poverty and microenterprises

In this chapter, Awaworyi Churchill conducts a meta-analysis to review the impact of microfinance on poverty reduction and microenterprise performance. He considers four proxies for poverty and three for microenterprise performance in order to examine the empirical evidence and to provide a general conclusion on the impacts of microfinance, while addressing issues of within and between-study variations. The chapter reports evidence of some positive effect on poverty, but this effect is weak.