Masomeh Jamshidi; Hossein Mahdizabeh
Abstract
The traditional strategy of economic empowerment of female heads of households in the form of microfinance and credit granting has positive and negative effects and consequences. The present study employed a structural analysis method to study the opinions of the experts. The main purpose of this paper ...
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The traditional strategy of economic empowerment of female heads of households in the form of microfinance and credit granting has positive and negative effects and consequences. The present study employed a structural analysis method to study the opinions of the experts. The main purpose of this paper is to identify the positive and negative consequences of the empowerment strategy in the regional (provincial) scale to analyze their influence and dependence. In order to collect information, deep interviewing method was initially used with 28 knowledgeable experts in the field of empowerment of women in different institutions of the province. The qualitative dta were collected through a researcher-made cross-sectional analysis matrix. Triangulation method and documentary and library information, direct observation and deep interviewing were used to ensure the reliability of qualitative data. After the first and second phases, the experts are provided with the designed questionnaires to examine the relationship between the variables in the cross-sectional matrix and the interrelationship between them. Micmac software has been used to analyze the data. The results showed that in the future, the most important positive indicators for the system analysis of the consequences of the traditional strategy of empowerment of female headed households were "job creation", "access to resources", "increase in production" and "entrepreneurship". The negative consequences include the variables of "waste of financial resources due to misuse of loans and microfinance", "major attention (and merely) of institutions to pay loans" and "increased false consumerism". According to the results, the conventional economic empowerment program for female-headed households in the future should be managed and organized in a way that has minimal negative impact and maximum positive effects. Therefore, the aforementioned empowerment system should reinforce and maximize the positive impacts and minimize the negative impacts.