 She is the source, the creator, the giver. Yet, she continues to seek her own self-expression, her identity, her empowerment. Her identity is always the result of her circumstances, her struggles. The survival of a family rests on the woman. Especially poor mothers must divide their time between work and their family role, balancing both their demands. An effort to build a better life is now being answered by microfinance. A simple big idea that has opened up opportunities for the poor, a chance to transform their lives, to pull themselves out of poverty. Small loans to poor people, for whom the traditional banks have not been accessible as they have no collateral. When the microfinance sector began its work about 20 years back, smaller savings, smaller loan, women are comfortable. Whereas men never bothered to give weightage to the kind of size of loan that was introduced in the microfinance sector first. Individually, you may not be able to provide financial services to low-income household women where if they are organized in a collective and each of them can vouch for each other's repayment, there is a way of reaching out to the women with the loan support so that the loan comes to the group and then they decide to whom the loan should be given. Microfinance loans are mostly used by the poor to establish or expand small businesses that generate additional income for the family. Today over 800 microfinance institutions are reaching out to over 7.3 million clients. Loans to the tune of 800 crores have been dispersed through the self-help group linkages and microfinance institutions. The figures no doubt astounding but how has it really impacted the lives of the women and their world. She has become much more aware of many things and also dealing with the microfinance institution, her own financial literacy has gone up. Many of them have been participating, canvassing for their own group members in the local panchayat elections. Some of them have been elected to the panchayat so we see that empowerment happening after two-three years of her being in these microfinance programs. We are not the only ones who are able to do what we want to do. We are able to do what we want to do. Before that, we had a housewife. After that, we started working as a group and then we started to get to know the outside world. After that, we started to have the courage to go anywhere. After we started working as a group, we started to have the courage. Microfinance is an extremely powerful tool for elevating poverty but it's not the only thing that is necessary. There needs to be governance around your place. There needs to be basic infrastructure. There needs to be forward and backward linkages for microfinance to work well and create surplus incomes for all households. But when we look at their free hands and smiling faces the next milestone, the next journey is going to be every bit worth one.