Impact of Microfinance Operations on the Livelihood of the Clients: A Review of the Existing Literature

Abstract

The contribution of microfinance in the development of global economy is undoubtedly admissible. The research has been carried out to explore the impact of microfinance on the livelihood of the clients. The study emphasized to detect clear-cut impact of microfinance on poverty eradication, livelihood security, and on the role of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) system on microfinance operations. There are considerable debates about the effectiveness of microfinance as tools for direct reducing poverty. A plenty of researches explore that microfinance has had a significant positive impact in changing livelihood by reducing poverty and it brings a positive shift in attitude towards life and improvement in the standard of living. Clients have been successful to increase their household income, decrease economic vulnerability, and they enjoy better nutrition, health facilities and greater empowerment, gain the opportunity to pursue education, and in some cases, they have been able to wipe out poverty completely. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate the impact of microfinance on the livelihood of poor people especially who participated in microfinance operations. Toward this objective, around 50 research articles have been critically reviewed and tried to extract the findings of the impact of microfinance operations. However, due to page limitations we are unable to provide all our review information. The research also highlights the application of ICT in order to speed up the transaction processes in microfinance operations.