RURAL BANKING AND WOMEN’S SOCIO-ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT IN GHANA: THE CASE OF THE WENCHI RURAL BANK

Abstract

Available studies suggest that there is still little primary data in the Ghanaian context to show whether rural banking activities hold any prospect for women’s socio-economic empowerment, hence the need for this study to assess to the efficacy of rural bank’s credit in empowering women in the research area. The objective of the research was to find out whether women can be empowered in the process of accessing and utilizing the rural bank credit in their socio-economic activities. The theoretical frameworks used for assessing the impact of credit activities on empowering women were drawn from several frameworks including Longwe’s (1994) Women's Empowerment Assessment Framework. Both qualitative and quantitative methods used which involved in-depth interviews, personal observations and focus group discussions. Also both qualitative and quantitative techniques were employed in the analysis of the data. The findings indicated that clients had significantly improved their status economically and socially. Economically, the findings revealed significant increased in their working capital, profit of beneficiaries and savings were also made as they engaged in the income generating activities with the micro-credit. Socially, the findings showed beneficiary increased participation in decision- making, gained control over and access to resources as well as increased self confidence as they could participate in intra-household decisions. It had revealed that the rural bank’s micro-credit has had positive impact on respondents’ socio-economic empowerment. However, challenges were inevitable as beneficiaries mentioned household emergency and domestic workload, delay disbursement of loans, high interest rate, limited market size, poor management, others as challenges they encountered. In order to sustain the programme impact on clients, there is the need for rural banks to establish a solid link between micro-credit products and formal personal loan facility such that beneficiaries can graduate successfully into the mainstream banking or individual credit for continue access to financial services for their businesses