MICROFINANCE AND POVERTY REDUCTION OF WOMEN INTREPRENENURS IN TAMALE METROPOLIS OF NORTHERN REGION, GHANA.

Abstract

The research was conducted to investigate the effects of micro finance on poverty among women entrepreneurs in Tamale M tropolis of orthem R gion, Ghana. The re earch covered one hundred and fift (ISO) women entrepreneurs in the Tamale Metropolis. In thi study, both secondary and primary sources of data were employed. The secondary sources of data were books peer review journals, articles, reports, magazines, news paper, and other publications. The primary source of data was generated through the use of instrument such as questionnaires. focus group discussion guide and interview guide. The research was cross-sectional in approach and descriptive in content using both quantitative and qualitativ methods to clas ify ariable. The analysis was done with SPS version 19.0.The results of the study are that account for pov rty, the study revealed that lack of capital poverty, God, large family size and inacc ssible market were the causes of poverty among the women entrepreneurs. The study also found out that many of the women entrepren urs easily accessed finance except few who could not acce S finance. It IV a disco ered that many of these women experienced improvement in their businesses after accessing finance. It was also found out that there was empirical evidence on an increment of women's assets after joining the microfinance scheme. ccording to the findings, house was one of the post finance assets acquired by one of the v om n, similarly' man of th women entrepreneurs appeared to experience improvement in their livelihood from their povert situation after th y accessed finance. On the issue of knowledge ofthe policies and regulations of microfinance op rations, the women mention d the following; One must be in trad before ou could ace s microfinance you must be prepared to repay loan, one must b long to a credible group before you could access credit, one should also attend meetings r gularly, one should provide guarantors before access, and finally the group must have an accounts with a bank. On the issue of awareness of these polici s and regulations, the study revealed that many of the women 'V ere aware of the existence of these policies and regulations. One intriguing findings was also on the issue of viability of th policies and regulations the tud also discovered that many of the women ga e an affirmative responses to the iabilit of the policies. In conelu ion th study showed that there was a significant relationship between microfinance access and poverty reduction among the women entrepreneurs at ninety five (95.0%) level of confidence from the chi-square tests.