This paper uses primary data from rural north India to show that participation in a community-level female empowerment … support groups, literacy camps, adult education classes, and vocational training for rural women in several states of India … disentangle the program's mechanisms, separately considering its effect on women who work, and those who do not work but whose …

The major form of microfinance in India is that based on women's Self Help Groups (SHGs), which are small groups of 10 …

ability of a spouse to deny permission for the other to work outside the home, and raising women's minimum age of marriage …. Thus both access to resources and the removal of restrictions on employment served to strengthen women's bargaining … of the reform's impact. The analysis finds that women were relatively more likely to work in occupations that require …

32 of 80 villages in one of the poorest districts in rural India in which to establish SHGs for women. Two years of … exposure to these programs increased women's participation in group savings programs as well as the non-agricultural labor … force. Compared to women in control villages, treated women were also more likely to participate in household decisions and …

and serve more women as a fraction of customers than do commercialized microfinance banks, but their costs per dollar lent …This paper describes important trade-offs that microfinance practitioners, donors, and regulators navigate. Drawing … evidence from large, global surveys of microfinance institutions, the authors find a basic tension between meeting social goals …

key microfinance approaches in India, taking a close look at the most dominant among these, the Self Help Group (SHG) Bank …: India's rural poor currently have very little access to finance from formal sources. Microfinance approaches have tried to …This paper reviews the current level and pattern of access to finance for India's rural poor and examines some of the …

findings show greater returns among men than among women; indeed, returns were not different from zero for women. The authors … social constraints limiting sales to local areas are not important. However, there is evidence that women invested grants … spend the grant on working capital and women on equipment. The gender gap is largest when male-dominated sectors are …

How cash transfers made to women are used has important implications for models of household behavior and for the … poor women in rural Ecuador to analyze the effect of transfers on the food Engel curve. There are two main findings. First … among households that only have adult females. Bargaining power between men and women is likely to be important in mixed …

This paper nowcasts poverty in India, one of the countries with the largest population below the international poverty … (at the $1.90 poverty line) for India in 2017 is estimated at 10.4 percent with a confidence interval of [8.1, 11.3]. The …

women's educational attainment. They argue that if the experience of the late 1990s is a guide to the future, the lack of …