Drawing upon the data from the recent period, this paper explores the relationship between women’s involvement in microfinance programs and improvement in their empowerment status.

Formal financial institutions (FFIs) in a developing economy often fail to meet the loan requirements of the poor. It is frequently stated that the poor are non bankable. Given this, several models and structures have emerged for making them bankable.

Of all the forms that violence against women can assume, sexual harassment is the most ubiquitous and insidious; all the more so because it is deemed 'normal' behaviour and not an assault on the female entity.

Recent studies examining British attitudes and ideologies which structured colonial policies towards 'outcaste'2 and 'deviant' groups in indigenous society, have suggested that the groups who were marginalised included those whose activities were conceived of as 'threatening' to new normative def