The Role of Micro credit and Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) - Extent and Intensity of poverty, poverty alleviation and Outreach

Abstract

This study is about micro credit and its contribution to the improvement and poverty reduction for millions of the poorest people of Bangladesh. Micro credit has a huge impact on the lives of millions of poor people particularly to women. Numerous scholars and NGOs have been working with micro credit to reach poor people, who are still not benefited by the conventional financial system. In this study, it has been tried to present evidence of the important contributions made by micro credit in the eradication of poverty by increasing the income generating activities, empowerment of poor people to access development services such as health and education, and reduction in vulnerability. Micro credit is now being considered as one of the most important and an effective mechanism for poverty reduction. Present study describes about micro credit activities and helps to investigate the impact of micro credit on the poor people of the society with the main focus on target people of the study area. Researcher mainly concise this study through client's (the poor people, who borrowed loan from micro credit institutions) perspective and build up this research based on questionnaire survey and field observation. Therefore, the objective of this study is to show how micro credit works to improve the quality of poor targeted groups and reducing poverty and how it affects the living standard (income, saving & health etc.) of the poor people in study area. Several micro credit institutions are working in the study area. Grameen Bank, BRAC, ASA and PROSHIKA are some of the prominent of them. These institutions are working tremendously to the empowerment, poverty reduction and improvement of living standards for the poor people in the study area.

Keywords: Micro credit, MFIs and Poverty alleviation.