Women’s agency and social structure: does microcredit contribute to surmount the challenges faced by women borrowers?

This study explores how access to microcredit influences women borrower’s agency and contributes to overcoming the challenges set by the existing social structure. In doing so, this research employed a qualitative exploratory research design and collected data through in-depth interviews with the rural women borrowers of the Bangladesh Rural Development Board. The findings explore that rural married women borrowers must seek permission from their husbands. In a few cases, husbands compel their wives to be members of the female cooperatives and borrow loans. Women have minimal scope to invest the loan independently, as they mostly pass on the loan to their husbands. Very few women who have participated in income-generating endeavors through loan investment mainly engage with traditionally defined homestead-based activities, such as stitching clothes, poultry, and livestock farming. This study argues that microcredit does not increase rural women borrower’s agency, as other important influential factors, such as existing unequal power relations, patriarchal ideologies, and hierarchies in the decision-making process within the household determined by social norms and gendered relations hindered their capacity to exercise agency. Therefore, this study suggests that improving women’s agency through microcredit should be coordinated with other effective initiatives to bring about broader structural changes.