The impact of socio-economic factors and attributes on repayment ability in Microfinancing : A study of microfinance programs in the Amhara region

Sammanfattning: An insufficient financial market means that poor individuals cannot access financial capital, making it difficult for them to generate a stable income. Formal banks see these individuals as unreliable customers because of their financial background and see a risk that these potential customers will not repay their loans, which would put the bank at risk. Banks usually use the borrower’s assets as collateral for their loans. Unfortunately, not many of these poor people have any assets. Microloans can solve these problems by opening up the opportunity for financial capital that enables poor people to make the investments needed to create or develop some form of production and thus increase employment. This research was carried out to analyze if the collected variables can determine the repayment ability of those who got a microloan from the Amhara Credit and Savings institution. Since the borrowers received their loans through two different processes, this study divided the data into two groups. Group 1 received their microloan based on a personality test and the individuals in group 2 received their microloan based on group lending. This division is done in order to be able to eliminate that the lending process itself may have affected the repayment ability. This study is based on random sample data from the Amhara Credit and Savings institution. Regression analyses were performed using the STATA-15 software. The results are not entirely consistent with previous studies because some variables did not get the expected outcome linked similar to previous studies. Some of the variables in this study appear to have an effect on the repayment ability, but not all. Thus, the conclusion is that the results are insufficient and further research needs to be made to reject or confirm the influence of the socio-economic factors and structure of the microloan on the repayment ability for Ethiopian borrowers.