The Cultural Discrimination against the Female Child: A Contributing Factor to the Failure of Microfinance in Alleviating Women Poverty of Rural Northern Ghana

Abstract

This article argues that though microfinance is endorsed as a financial tool to poverty alleviation in most developing countries including some parts of Ghana, the rural Northern Ghanaian woman who faces cultural discrimination is yet to see its benefit. A snowballing sampling procedure was used to sample and investigate 247 microfinance clienteles' poverty alleviation in the three Northern Regions of Ghana.  SPSS statistical software was employed to analyze the survey data. The results confirmed that Rural Northern Ghana, a male dominance society is the major hindrance to the positive impact of microfinance in improving the women financial position in the area. This study concludes that microfinance is incapable of alleviating women poverty in Northern Ghana because certain outmoded cultural practices and negative stereotypes of the female person are still in place in Northern Ghana. And microfinance will be able to alleviate poverty in the area if the developmental objectives of the area are restructured to included free and compulsory education for any group of persons living in the Rural Northern Territory of Ghana.