Effectiveness of microfinance in uplifting women’s development: the case of Sumbawanga District Council

This study seeks to address the effectiveness of microfinance in uplifting women development. Its main objective was to investigate whether microfinance has been effective to uplift women development in the council specifically Sumbawanga District Council. The study was purely qualitative. The data was collected through documentary sources, focus group discussion, questionnaires and interview and it was analyzed using Software Package for Statistical Sciences (SPSS). The findings show a positive relationship between microfinance programmes and indictors of women financial sustainability such as women saving accounts, business performance, networking with other entrepreneurs, women income levels, women status and autonomy, a longer term access to financial resources and improvement of standard of living. The findings reveal that there are limiting factors hindering microfinance initiatives to uplifting women development as such there was a need to work on pertinent aspects so as to rectify the situation because performance of microfinance on uplifting women development in SDC was revealed to be limited. Following this, it was concluded that one of the predominant solution could be that financial institutions should extend their services to the very poor and disadvantaged groups so as to enhance women access financial services. It is in that case recommended that microfinance institutions should institute gender policy that could go further than basing on a few female products and a bit of gender training.