The impact of microcredit has become a highly contested question. Lauded as a panacea for poverty and gender inequality, microcredit has conversely been criticized for deepening both. This paper (unfortunately, not available on open access):
There appears to be a gap between the often optimistic (societal) belief in the capacity of microcredit to mitigate the position of women in decision-making processes within the household on the one hand, and the empirical evidence base on the other hand, a gap which this meta-analysis should not be thought to have bridged.
The paper discusses complexities and limitations of interest to those working on microcredit as well as those using meta-analysis.
The authors identified “control over household spending” as a measure of women’s empowerment in developing countries. Through this review, they aimed to assess the impact of microcredit by judging its effect on this key dimension. However, the studies they identified and analysed covered an extremely wide range of methodologies, domains and measures. Most significantly, definitions and concepts of “empowerment” varied widely.
In the course of the meta-analysis, we came to conclusions that there were significant risks of over-interpretation when studies are highly heterogeneous, and there appeared to be publication bias.
To the limited extent that conclusions about microcredit were possible, the authors note that:
Since the late 1990s, systematic reviews and meta-analyses have risen in popularity in international development to provide evidence on ‘what works’. However, as this paper demonstrates, meta-analysis relies on a minimal degree of comparability among studies.
Mixed results related to women’s empowerment can partly be explained by the heterogeneity of microcredit interventions, contexts and target groups and in large part due to differences in conceptualisation and measurement of empowerment. This paper extracts quantitative effect size information on variables that relate to women’s control over household spending without critiquing the construction of the metric of control and attempts a meta-analysis of 29 studies.
Among other limitations, the authors note that:
This meta-analysis review: