Introduction

Recently many governmental and non-governmental organizations in many low income countries have introduced credit programs targeted at the poor. Many of these programs specially target women based on the view that the wage labor market and have an inequitable share of power in house-hold decision making. The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh is perhaps the best-known example of these small-scale production credit programs for the poor and over 90% of its clients are women. 

Earlier work has found that the effects of program participation differ importantly by the gender of program participation. For example, Pitt and Khandker (1998) find that the flow of consumption expenditure increases 18 taka for every 100 taka borrowed by women, but only 10 taka for every 100 taka borrowed by men. Pitt, Khandker, Choudhury and Millimet (2003), using a totally different approach to parameter identification and find that credit provided women importantly improves measures of health and nutrition for both boys and girls, while credit provided men has no significant level.

In the debate on micro-credit programs and women’s empowerment, domestic violence is an issue of critical importance in Bangladesh, where severe gender disparities in a society has caused domestic violence to become an accepted and even institutionalized practice (Koenig et al., 2003).

According to the Demographic and Health Surveys, which collects standardized data on domestic violence in many countries in the developing world, domestic violence rates in Bangladesh are among the highest in the world with recent figures from the 2007 DHS, showing that over 52% of ever-married women had experienced some form of violence from their husbands in their lives.

Micro-credit membership in Bangladesh also is widely prevalent, with recent figures showing membership rates as high as one in three households. In the 2007 BDHS domestic violence module, the representative subsample of women that we use in this study, the proportion of women who are members of groups with a micro-credit component was as high as 38%.

Though there is no doubt that ‘Micro-credit’ creates greater opportunity to be self independent especially for women in our country, but it also creates violence in the family & society.  Therefore the ‘Micro-credit & Women Violence’ has been a topic for research. For example, Kishor & Johnson (2006), Elisberg et al. (1999), Heise (1998), Jewkes (2002) find that poverty leads  to stress and conditions that could be lead to increased domestic violence. Women in the micro-credit groups may be a group that is more at risk to violence to begin with because micro-credit program deals with women specially, poor and functionally landless women.