The primary clientele of MFIs like VFS are women. In fact, MFIs like us provide credit only to women because women, when empowered, have the capacity to improve the financial condition of not just their immediate family but also other women around them. With data revealing that even now only around 26 percent women in India are employed, particularly when most women in rural areas cannot even think of stepping out of the house, MFIs like us have worked to change the situation substantially. Several studies and surveys by leading consultancy firms and financial institutions have pointed out that while as much as 99 percent of MFI borrowers are women, more than 90 percent of them showed signs of improved financial condition after they got associated with a MFI and launched their enterprise.

Over time, they have not just improved things for themselves but also for their families, particularly for their daughters, but also for women in the neighbourhood. Statistics reveal that following their association with a MFI, the resulting combination of enhanced income and improved decision-making helped them to access better amenities at their households. Access to toilet facilities at home jumped, as did other modern tools of communication like television and cell phones.

Almost all these women showed an increase in confidence they had never thought would be possible, otherwise. In fact, most of them started receiving better treatment and even respect within the family. As women turned entrepreneurs, they helped uplift other women around them by providing them with employment, who in turn, started having better access to healthcare for their family, started speaking up in favour of better education for their daughters instead of getting them married off at an early age, and most of them devised a financial road map to identify how much they can earn and spend, making their financial literacy complete.

Studies by Sa-Dhan, the self-regulatory body in India for microfinance, found that annual savings of women associated with MFIs showed a marked improvement, even after factoring in an annual rate of inflation. If MFIs helped women in rural areas to change their own lives and provide some kind of upward mobility to both their own families and also to other women around them, then this was also possible because a large percentage of women started their own business after joining a MFI.