... of cooperatives' social and economic empowerment of female smallholders remains limited. We apply Sen's capability approach to female entrepreneurs' socioeconomic empowerment to examine whether women's participation in a coffee and microfinance cooperative from rural western Uganda benefits their social...

...Irene Ukanwa; Lin Xiong; Alistair Anderson Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of why the poorest, most disadvantaged groups such as rural African women, benefit less from microfinance. The authors focus on the perception and experiences of ordinary rural entrepreneurial...

...Samia Mahmood; Javed Hussain; Harry Z. Matlay Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of microfinance loans on poverty reduction amongst women entrepreneurs in Pakistan. The authors set out to establish whether there exists an optimal loan size to attain the objectives...