How Crowd Funding Act as a Strategic Springboard to Empower Women?

Abstract

Empowerment of women is crucial for economic growth and diversification, that is when more women force is put to use, it adds to the economic growth. It also enables women in generating their own source of income, which gives them control over their financial needs increasing the sense of self-worth. An economically independent women could offer better education and living standards to her family. Thus, by facilitating women’s access to finance they can be economically empowered, satisfy their financial needs, and enable them to launch and expand their own businesses, which promotes women’s advancement into positions of leadership and decision-making. But in the real scenario women face difficulties in accessing finance from conventional sources, mainly due to lack of appropriate collateral and gender inequalities persisting in the society. Here comes the role of crowdfunding, as it can be used as a tool to bridge the funding gap because the crowdfunding platforms democratizes a funding process where the woman doesn’t need to give any collateral securities or guarantors for accessing fund and in addition to this, their ideas and needs will be looked upon to rather than their gender. Irrespective of the growing academic concentration in this area, there is lack of studies incorporating the views of previous research about this topic in a single study. The descriptive and exploratory analysis in this article brings together the collective insight from the current studies and relevant literature. The main objective of this conceptual study was to figure out the major barriers faced by women in accessing finance from conventional financial system. The study will also explore crowd funding as a tool for economic empowerment of women.