There are many things that go unsung about women. Take for example, their habits of setting aside resources to tide over bad times. Across nations and cultures women traditionally maintain a store. That store has always been used to set aside a little of grains or money and use that as savings.

Such habits have traditionally been referred to as emulation worthy. Mothers have, for ages, insisted that the children learn the value of savings. For ages while men have been referred to as the bread earners, it actually has been the responsibility of the women to use the earning rationally. They have been the ones who fed the family and enforced discipline.

Savings are the first step and the most important step in financial discipline. If you spend all that you earn now nothing would be left for the future. That again is the first principle in creating the prosperity of a family. The buck, however, doesn’t stop here. An aggregation of good habit of saving also leads to the prosperity of a nation.

Women’s role in setting aside for the rainy day has been studied by development economists in depth. They have done so to find out ways to put it into development dynamics. And the findings have led to evolution of strategies to fight poverty.

The entire micro finance movement is based on empowering women precisely because of this. The basic tenet of the movement rests on the principle that women are the ones who are the main actors within a family to hold it together and keep it running. So if they could be empowered that would lead to breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and put the poor on the cycle of prosperity.

This would also create an overall ambience of financial discipline by creating an urge among all to save and invest. But for the savings in a piggy bank, that’s what traditionally was the practice, to get into investment channel for generating returns requires awareness. So putting the women first is not enough. The strategy needed a structure that would allow the women to borrow and along with their savings that borrowing would lead to productive investment for creation of surplus.

The focus on women therefore was to leverage their financial discipline into productive channel and make development a sustainable process. The concept of microfinance, therefore, puts women first in terms of providing them with capital and handholding them to create awareness about the productive use of money.