Financing Women's Enterprise

Thea Hilhorst; Harry Oppenoorth

doi:10.3362/9781780444994

Financing Women's Enterprise

Beyond barriers and bias

Emphasises how to improve the access of poor self-employed women to financial services. Includes a review of current knowledge about women's need for finance, how this is presently met and how this could be improved.

Published: 1992
Pages: 104

eBook: 9781780444994

Paperback: 9781853391743


Preface 7
Acknowledgements 8
Introduction 9
1 Credit interventions: context and history 15
Macroeconomy and policy environment
Experience with rural credit schemes
Summary
2 Women's work and income 23
Household based production
Control over income
Reproductive work
The importance of self-employment
Characteristics of women's enterprises
Dynamics and development patterns of women's enterprises
Summary
3 Women and finance 33
Savings
Decision making and place in production
Possibilities, problems and consequences of finance
Summary
4 Informal finance 43
Informal finance sources
Self-finance and loans from relatives and friends
Rotating and non-rotating funds
Moneylenders and pawnbrokers
Wholesale traders and shopkeepers
Sharecropping arrangements
Summary
5 Development programmes and 'semi-formal' 53
financial institutions
Credit within multiple service programmes
Income generating projects for women
Rotating and revolving funds
Savings and credit unions and cooperatives
Peoples' banks
Summary
6 Women and the formal financial system 69
Formal financial institutions and poor women
Barriers and possible solutions: a challenge to banks
Risk reduction
Transaction costs and incentives to banks
Long-term access to and sustainability of financial services
The performance of financial institutions
Summary
Epilogue 87
Appendix 1: Gender 91
Appendix 2: Symposium participants 93
Appendix 3: Symposium papers 95
Bibliography 97
6 FINANCING