Published Paper Details:

In India, Microfinance has emerged as a major intervention to reduce poverty. Innumerable stakeholders of microfinance are enthusiastically channeling financial assistance and resources to poor households in urban and rural areas through NGOs and MFIs who are engaged in microfinance activities. The microfinance program is considered as one of the most practical and attractive tools for providing access to credit to the poor and henceforth lessening poverty and achieving Sustainable Livelihood (SL). Therefore, it becomes very important to study how these two concepts are interlinked together for ensuring the sustainable livelihood generation and sustainable rural development of a nation. The present research work is an attempt to draw out the linkages between Microfinance and Sustainable Livelihood Approach (SLA) and to investigate the impact of microfinance on sustainable rural livelihood by using various sustainability measurement indicators. The impact assessment has been carried out on 355 BPL household families of Agra District by using Wilcoxon Signed-Rank Test. This research finds that there is a positive and significant impact of microfinance and sustainable rural livelihood. Microfinance provides financial accessibility to the rural poor of Agra District by increasing their total family income through generating numerous livelihood parameters like human capital, financial capital, social capital, natural capital, and physical capital. This livelihood generation provides hope to the poor people to ensure sustainable livelihood by improving their health, education, skills, assets, and involvement in social activities and hence acknowledge them as an important part of society that assisting in achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).