Impact of Microfinance Services on Women’s Entrepreneurship Development: Evidence from Pokhara Metropolitan City

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the impact of microfinance services on the development of women’s entrepreneurship in Pokhara Metropolitan City. Microfinance provides economically marginalized women with essential financial and non-financial services such as microcredit, savings, advisory, and insurance services. Despite their wide availability, limited studies have explored how these services contribute to women entrepreneurship in Pokhara Metropolitan City. The study adopted a descriptive and causal-comparative research design using primary data collected through structured questionnaires from 217 valid responses using convenicence sampling design. The result revealed that there were high perceived benefits of savings, microcredit and advisory services in expanding business, profitability, financial stability, and women’s confidence whereas insurance services was not direct impact on entrepreneurship development in Pokhara City. The correlation analysis revealed that there was positive significant relationship among microfinance services and entrepreneurship development. Regression analysis showed that advisory, savings, and microcredit significantly impact on the entrepreneurship development. Furthermore, insurance services showed insignificant influence on entrepreneurship development. The study conclude that microfinance plays an important role in uplifting the women’s entrepreneurship government policies, subsidies, entrepreneurship training programs to further enhance women’s entrepreneurial development. Future research direction can be examining the mediating variable of financial literacy, innovation and digital financial literacy. In addition , qualitative research can be explored to understand why insurance services remain underutilized in microfinnce instituions.