Resumo

The main goal of microfinance is to support small entrepreneurship activities with credit, but business consultancy and training are also common, helping to improve lives. Microcredit purpose is aligned with feminist perspectives when considers relevant any kind of initiative that increases women agency (GARIKIPATI, 2013). These changes have been analyzed from a set of researchers related to women empowerment in Asia, Africa and even in Central America, but no studies are found covering Brazilian or South America contexts.

Considering microcredit institutions as successful spaces of practices for underprivileged women entrepreneurs and using these new approaches to construct an innovative framework, this article aims to develop a scale to measure social changes (SC) achieved by women, promoted by entrepreneurship and enhanced by microfinance. This scale combines dimensions proposed by Lumpkin, Bacq and Pidduck (2018): physical, financial, human and social capital with resistance practices dimensions, based on Medina’s (2014) Epistemology of Resistance.

Lumpkin, Bacq and Pidduck (2018) propose a model to evaluate social entrepreneurship practices. Their framework presents four dimensions for an extra organizational level of analysis of social entrepreneurship results: Physical capital, Financial capital, Human capital and Social capital. The most usual manner used to evaluate SC for women is trying to measure empowerment enhanced by microfinance. Empowerment, in a feminist point of view, can be “(…) understood to be a set of processes that result in the expansion of woman’s agency (GARIKIPATI, 2013, p.56).

To comprehend which aspects of gender empowerment enhanced by microcredit have been studied in the last years, we carried out a research with some of the most important scientific databases in the world: Emerald, Ebsco, Sage, Science Direct, Elsevier and others. As to scale development process, we decided to follow Netemeyer, Bearden and Sharma (2003) general processes, as well as consulting other works, to give the process robustness, like Clark and Watson (1995). For the field research (n = 168) we choose the most important microcredit program in South America, Crediamigo.

We followed Lumpkin, Bacq and Pidduck (2018) framework with four types of capital measuring the gain of social entrepreneurship, as a measure of social change, each of them a dimension in our construct. We added an additional one, resistance. Validations with managers, a PHD and loan officers and a pre-test left us with a scale of 29 items. The EFA results reduced the items to 18 explaining 70.33 percent variance (α = 0.91) with good fit (KMO > 0.9, Barlett’s sig at 0.001). The average inter item correlation was 0.37.Financial, Human and Resistance dimensions were kept and a new one emerged.

Empirical data appears to agree with the theory and the systematic literature review. We got evidence a suitable measure for change that microcredit provides for women agree with the framework proposed by Lumpkin, Bacq and Pidduck (2018), complemented by a notion of resistance. We are still preparing another field validation to finish the scale creation procedures.

Clark, L. A., & Watson, D. (1995). Constructing validity: Basic issues in objective scale development. Psychological Assessment, 7, 309-319. Garikipati, S. (2013) Microcredit and women’s empowerment: have we been looking at the wrong indicators? Oxford Development Studies, 41, Supplement, S53-S75 Lumpkin, G.T., Bacq, S. & Pidduck, R.J. (2018) Where change happens: community-level phenomena in social entrepreneurship research. Journal of Small Business Management. 56(1), 24-50. Netemeyer, R. G.; Bearden, W. O.; Sharma, S. (2003) Scaling Procedures: Issues and Aplications. London: Thousand Works