Empowering Women Through Peer to Peer Lending: Case Study of Amartha.com

Over several decades, Indonesia's labor participation is vastly dominated by males. The problem lies on the women's limited opportunities to access and control the resources, combines with their low skills, lack of education, and ideological barriers that land the women in the “stay in the kitchen” mentality. This also affects economic fields, including digital business fields such as e-commerce. Due to this reason, female empowerment in Indonesia is extremely needed. This paper focuses on a case study of a fintech service in Indonesia called Amartha.com. Amartha is a peer-to-peer lending service that also contributes to the women empowerment. The research is conducted by performing interviews involving Amartha.com's lenders and borrowers as well as literature study. The authors found that Amartha has succeeded in increasing women's income, creating new jobs, improving community planning and organizational experience, and building skills.