The Effects of Microcredit on Women’s Control Over Household Spending in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

This report aims to provide a systematic review of the evidence on effects of microcredit on women’s control over household spending in developing countries. More specifically, it analyzes the available impact evaluative evidence to predict the causal relationship between microcredit and women empowerment. For the study, the authors identified 310 papers for full text examination, of which, 29 papers were retained for further analysis. These papers were then analyzed through application of both statistical meta-analysis and context-mechanism-outcome synthesis. Through the analysis, the report finds that overall there is no evidence for an effect of microcredit on women’s control over household spending. It covers the followings sections in detail:

• Background of the study with a focus on the effectiveness of microcredit, objective of the study, and theoretical model and delimitation;
• Discussion on methodology including literature screening process, search strategy, coding and data extraction, quality assessment of previous studies, and quantitative and qualitative synthesis;
• Results of the study with critical appraisal, quantitative synthesis of effect sizes, and qualitative synthesis of included studies;
• Summary, concluding remarks, limitations of the study, and deviations from the standard protocol.