Fostering Entrepreneurship with Microfinance - A Study on Karachi-Pakistan

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the financial facility provided by microfinance; Microfinance sector holds significant impact on promoting entrepreneurship. Microfinance provides its services to marginalize groups of people. It enables them to use modern financial services for self-employment purpose. It carries dual effect firstly, on micro level its impact on social uplift of the poor people of the state. Secondly, on macro level economy of the state by increasing domestic production. This Research contains proposition to gauge the relationship between two factors i.e. microfinance and entrepreneurship. These factors are associated with further subfactors: marginalized group, self-employment, small scale business, economic & social uplift, ease of financial access. Research is descriptive and qualitative in nature. Methodology adopted is phenomenology, primary data has been collected having a population of microfinance institution representatives and beneficiaries with a sample size of 30 with structured and semi-structured interviews. The type of sampling is non-probability sampling; purposive sampling is used to collect data. While finding the relationship between microfinance and entrepreneurship, the core themes of this relationship are identified as (i) target population (ii) motive of existence (iii) focus area to promote (iv) economic and social impacts (v) financial conditions. The overall study, by using primary data and secondary (literature) sources of collected data shows that factors microfinance and entrepreneurship have significant relationship and are strongly supportive factors for each other. Microfinance sector itself is a growing sector in Pakistan, since the time of its inception, and doing progress by passage of time and moving ahead towards its targets such as economical as well as social well-being.