Abstract
This article examines the impact of the rural women’s participation in the micro-credit programme on their levels of empowerment in different domains, namely, savings, use of money, physical mobility, decision making, health and children’s education. For this purpose, we applied the method of propensity score matching to appropriately measure the empowerment gains after addressing the problem of selection biases arising out of differences in observable characteristics of the members of the treatment (participant) and the comparison (non-participant) groups. To measure the influences of various family/social conditions on the individuals’ agency freedom, we applied the framework suggested by the Self-Determination Theory (SDT). The data used in this study have been collected through a field survey in six blocks of Midnapore district of West Bengal. Our overall conclusion is that the participation in the micro-credit programme by the rural women in our study areas helped to enhance their levels of empowerment at least in some domains.
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