Microcredit to women as a poverty alleviation tool: the case of turkish grameen microcredit programme in Diyarbakir

Date

2012

Author

Çakmak, Dicle

Metadata

Show full item record

Item Usage Stats

320
views

0
downloads

Alleviation of poverty has become a major issue in the agenda of many countries and there is a search for a cure for this issue in social policy environment. For the last few decades, i.e., since the establishment of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, microcredit programmes have been used an important tool that is used to combat increasing poverty in both developing and developed world. The importance of this tool also comes from the fact that the target group of microfinance institutions is mainly women. The popularity of this poverty alleviation tool has reached to Turkey at the very beginning of 2000s. In this context, whether and/or to what extent microcredit is effective in taking women and their families out of poverty becomes a major question. Based on the assumption that poverty is a multidimensional issue, the main aim of this thesis is to explore the relationship between micro credit and poverty. This relationship will be understood by looking deeply at women’s lives through semi-structured interviews with beneficiaries of Diyarbakır office of Turkish Grameen Microcredit Programme. As a result of this study, it is found that a few women become entrepreneurs and engage in economic activities. Rather, they generally apply for microcredit for consumption concerns, for payments of other debts and to expand their current business. Therefore, microcredit remains insufficient to end people’s poverty since it do not provide a transformative and structural power to the poor.

Subject Keywords

Women

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12614249/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/21320

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis

Suggestions

OpenMETU
Core

An Analysis of women's cooperatives in urban Turkey in terms of women's empowerment Varol, Fatma Cansu; Ecevit, Fatma Yıldız; Department of Sociology (2013) Especially recently, cooperatives occupy the global agenda as efficient organizations that contribute to mainstream development goals. However, cooperatives, which may also emerge as grassroots organizations, could create an alternative through empowering women socially, economically and politically. In this respect, this study investigates the impact of women’s cooperatives on women’s empowerment in urban Turkey. Empowerment Approach composes the theoretical framework of this study. Primarily, the mainstre...
Faith-based welfare provision to women in Konya Tekten, Zeynep Serap; Beşpınar Akgüner, Fatma Umut; Department of Social Policy (2014) The main objective of this study is to examine faith-based welfare provision in Konya from a gender perspective. FBOs’ assumptions and ideology about the nature of women’s poverty and the mechanisms FBOs use to alleviate women’s poverty is discussed. Women, and especially single women, take priority in receiving assistance from FBOs in Konya. The reasons for giving priority to women are based on patriarchal and religious reasoning. Women are prioritised for their caretaker roles as well as their symbolic st...
Woman’s labor and poverty : the case of Eskisehir province in Turkey Güneş, Fatime; Ecevit, Mehmet Cihan; Department of Sociology (2006) This study examines critically how women in poverty use their labor in the production and reproduction processes against poverty and the effects of these processes on women becoming poor referring to women’s knowledge. The material foundation of women’s poverty is conceptualized as a two-way devaluation of women’s labor used in social reproduction. Patriarchal, cultural and ideological structures and relationships are studied as other determinants of women’s poverty. In this framework, women’s poverty studi...
Time poverty and the poverty of economics Ghosh, Jayati (Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi (Ankara, Turkey), 2001-4) In this paper I take up one particular aspect of deprivation that is often ignored or given less significance in discussions relating to poverty and inequality: that of time poverty. I will argue that ignoring this important dimension of poverty results from a related and possibly more substantive deficiency: the inadequate conception of what constitutes work that underlies much of our empirical data collection and our policies and programmes. This in turn has many adverse implications in terms of gend...
Immigrant domestic women workers in Ankara and Istanbul Çelik, Nihal; Ecevit, Fatma Yıldız; Department of Sociology (2005) This study focuses on the relationship between global economy and women̕s labor within a feminist standpoint by examining the personal and occupational experiences of immigrant women doing domestic work in Turkey. The main concern of this study is to investigate how working and living experiences of immigrant domestic women workers in Turkey are shaped by their illegal worker and immigrant status. The aim of this study is to listen to the personal experiences of immigrant domestic women workers from themsel...

Citation Formats

D. Çakmak, “Microcredit to women as a poverty alleviation tool: the case of turkish grameen microcredit programme in Diyarbakir,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2012.