微型金融与女性赋权研究概述

Positive Impact of Microfinance on Women's Empowerment

随着微型金融的发展,女性借款人所占比重越来越大。研究认为其主要原因是:利用妇女的性别特征,微型金融机构可以帮助她们尽快致富;瞄准妇女的微型金融可以降低女婴死亡率、提高女性的文化水平;可以避免妇女对女孩的忽视和选择性流产女性胎儿;可以解决资金在男女之间分配的不平等问题;还可以降低微型金融机构收回本利的风险,等等。另外,微型金融之所以有助于提升女性赋权水平、实现男女平等,其根本原因在于它有助于消除普遍存在的对女性的资本抑制现象,提高妇女生育过多孩子所耗时间的机会成本,并通过联保小组内的联带责任、成员监督等机制保护妇女权益。

As female borrowers making up more percentage of microfinance institutions＇ clients,we are interested in finding out why microfinance institutions choose women as their main clients.The main reasons include making use of the existing gender stereotypes,reducing mortality rate and increasing literacy rate,avoiding women＇s neglect of female infants and women＇s selective abortion of female fetuses,resolving unbalanced capital distribution between different sexes,and reducing repayment risks,etc.Microfinance helps encourage women＇s empowerment and realize gender equality because it reduces the constraints of capital on women,provides protection to women through the related responsibility and the peer monitoring,and encourages women to control family size by raising the opportunity cost of time.