Abstract:
Micro finance is considered as major instrument used to protect people from
poverty throughout the world. Micro finance institutions in each country are
supporting much to women entrepreneurs for achieving their goal by assisting them
with providing micro credits, training, saving facilities. The major purpose of this
study is to examine the impact of micro finance on performance of women
entrepreneurs in Sri Lanka. Credit, savings and training were considered as
predictor variables and criterion variable was performance of women entrepreneurs.
Standard questionnaire with five point likert scales was used to collect the data from
100 women entrepreneurs functioning in Batticaloa district using stratified sampling
method. Descriptive and inferential statistics have been carried out with the use of
SPSS package to analyze the data. Cronbach's Alpha was used to ensure the
reliability of collected data. It exposed that all the data collected are reliable, since cronbach's Alpha for entire variable was more than 0.6. Coefficient of
determination of model revealed that 60% of total variance in performance of
women entrepreneur is explained by micro credit, savings and training. The result
of this study revealed that training and saving have positive and significant impact
on performance of women entrepreneur while micro credit has no significant impact
on performance. According to the finding of this study, researcher can conclude that
women entrepreneurs can be motivated further by increasing number of training
programmes per year since most of women entrepreneurs dropped out of school
education and savings to improve performance of their entrepreneur activities.
Micro finance institutions can increase loan amount and reduce interest rate to make
higher impact on performance of women entrepreneurs. Further result of this study
can help to motivate more women in rural areas to engage in entrepreneurial actives
for reducing poverty.
