The Causal Effect of Women’s’ Participation in Microfinance Program on Their Likelihood of Experiencing Intimate Partner Violence

This study examined the intimate partner violence (IPV) or domestic violence against women in the rural area of Bangladesh who participate in four types of microfinance programs such as Grameen Bank, BRAC, Asha, Proshika using propensity score matching as the identification strategy. Previous studies only used cross sectional data to identify the effect of microfinance on IPV, however, this study used multiple cross-sectional data to identify the causal effect. Survey data from nationally representative Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey for the years of 2007, 2011 and 2014 were used to investigate the association between microfinance participation and domestic violence of 111,784 ever-married women between the ages of 18 and 49. The results show that likelihood of experiencing IPV was found to be significantly higher with the intervention of microfinance program participation in most of the cases. However, the results in this study indicated that husbands’ higher years of education has a significant negative effect on some type of IPV and the age of the husband along with the number of children in the household have a statistically significant positive effect on IPV. In Bangladesh, the likelihood of experiencing IPV significantly decreases with the age of the woman and higher education. This result indicates that the economic empowerment among women may not be a strong indication of lower likelihood of IPV