Poverty and Access to Microfinance with Gender Dimension

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This paper examines the development of microfinance market from the household perspective as it relates to poverty alleviation. It employs poverty decomposition and dominance analysis. The analysis was divided into four components: comparison between beneficiaries of community-oriented financial institutions (COFIs) and nonbeneficiaries; comparison between male-headed and female-headed households; comparison between male-headed and female-headed beneficiary households; and comparison between male-headed and female-headed nonbeneficiary households. Results show that there is a large disparity in poverty incidence between COFI beneficiaries and nonbeneficiaries while the results on the comparison between male-headed and female-headed households reveal that there is hardly any difference between these two groups. Among COFI beneficiaries, female-headed households appear to be poorer than male-headed households while among nonbeneficiaries, male-headed households appear to be poorer than female-headed households.