**1. Introduction**

Pakistan has started embracing women in all walks of life—business women, entrepreneurs, working women, and owners. Micro-finance institutions, women beneficiaries, and natural environment have been identified as few of the indicators of this study. The key informants were samples from a leading micro-finance institution—kashf Foundation customers, who were compared with non-Kashf Foundation customers in Pakistan. Two variables have been analyzed where handicrafts are taken as the independent variable while the socio-economic status of women is taken as the dependent variable. As women have become a source of income in a country like Pakistan, they have been given the power of decision making and their status in society has also increased. Schuler and Hashmi [1], in their study of the impact of micro-credit programs initiated by Grameen Bank and Bangladesh Rural Advancement

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Committee (BRAC) to empower women through various economic opportunities, measure the effectiveness of these programs by the increase in contraceptive use among poor rural women in Bangladesh. They define women empowerment in a specific socio-economic way as the increasing capacity of women to be physically mobile, have increased economic security, and reduce their vulnerability to household violence among others.

they bore high interest rates on loans they took for their work. They preferred to enter the handloom and handicrafts industry. Briefly, Sinha states that these women needed guidance and appreciation because they lacked many skills such as training, technology up-gradation, designing and new product development, packaging, and marketing. Different organizations working for entrepreneurship development should lead women in a defined direction using their spirits to excel in the industry. Despite all the aforementioned problems, women of this

Micro-Finance: A Driver for Entrepreneurship http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.75031 73

Park and Changqing [6] established the Grameen Bank model in China to measure the effectiveness of reaching far-off clients in poverty-stricken areas. The model was created to gauge the performance of NGOs compared to formal financial institutions, but concluded that further innovations in methodology was required. Ahmed et al. [7] observed that reforms in foreign trade begin at the micro-level. By enhancing economic growth, the former can be achieved. Omoregie [8] describes each entrepreneurial activity as a challenge with abundant opportunities. He uses the buyer experience cycle and utility matrix, and the entrepreneurial process renewal, regeneration, and entrepreneuring model to close the gaps, enhance the opportunities, and build for a sustainable entrepreneurial environment. Rahman and Luo [9] critically evaluated the overall performance of three NGO-type micro-finance services in the Shaanxi province of China and compared them with the existing Grameen bank model. They concluded that more focus on outreach, credit performance, financial sustainability, and regulatory situation is required and awareness is to be generated for the selected micro-finance service providers to successfully govern the micro-finance lending. Samia [10] conducted an exploratory study to understand the entrepreneurial behavior among the women in the Pakistan and concluded that micro-finance lending helped more than half of the women with

Barr [11] argued that micro-finance can help foster market innovations, noting that a sound credit history can play a vital role in channelizing these innovations. Jegatheesan et al. [12] embraced the idea of entrepreneurialism with micro-finance in Africa. They concluded that government strategies and acceptance of such activities is required for successful outcomes

Krishnaraj [13] analyses rural women handicraft as a type of subsistence production. She argues that women's work in bamboo craft production at household levels is affected by three factors: socio-economic contexts (caste and class), larger development and growth policies at state level and the way the household of these subsistence workers respond to these two larger contexts. Handicrafts are a source of women empowerment. In Pakistan, the handicrafts work is not as much appreciated due to which the women from underdeveloped areas remain in poverty and misery. It is one of the reasons why the arts and crafts in Pakistan are not well marketed. Lack of creative market strategies and negligence of government toward this sector also led to the negligence of this craft. When we look at the trend of handicrafts

region have a very high potential to develop socio-economically.

rural backgrounds to start a new business activity.

**3. Handicrafts and women empowerment**

of such initiatives.
