Microcredit And Women

In Making Women Pay, Smitha Radhakrishnan explores India's microfinance industry, which in the past two decades has come to saturate the everyday lives of women in the name of state-led efforts to promote financial inclusion and women's empowerment. Despite this favorable language, Radhakrishnan argues, microfinance in India does not provide a market-oriented development intervention, even though it may appear to help women borrowers. Rather, this commercial industry seeks to extract the maximum value from its customers through exploitative relationships that benefit especially class-privileged men. Through ethnography, interviews, and historical analysis, Radhakrishnan demonstrates how the unpaid and underpaid labor of marginalized women borrowers ensures both profitability and symbolic legitimacy for microfinance institutions, their employees, and their leaders. In doing so, she centralizes gender in the study of microfinance, reveals why most microfinance programs target women, and explores the exploitative implications of this targeting.

"Using the case study of Bangladesh and based on a long term participatory observation method, this book investigates the claims of the success of microcredit, as well as the critiques of it in the context of women's empowerment. It confronts the distinction between women's increasing wealth as a consequence of the success of microcredit programmes and their apparent not-commensurate empowerment, and looks at two organisations operating in two localities in rural Bangladesh in order to discover how these concepts are often confused. The book goes on to establish that the success stories of the microcredit programme are blown out of proportion, and that the dynamics of collective responsibility for repayment of loans by a group of women borrowers - usually seen to be a tool for success of microcredit - is in fact no less repressive than traditional debt collectors. It is a worthwhile contribution to development debates, challenging adherents to more closely specify those conditions under which microcredit does indeed have validity, as well as providing useful research for South Asian Studies and Development Studies"--

The first feminist critique of the much-lauded microcredit process in Bangladesh.

Women and Microfinance in the Global South is a grounded exploration of the intersections of neoliberal ideology and feminism.

Micro-credit has been taken as a prominent tool for poverty alleviation and women's empowerment. This book has presented the double-edged claim of microcredit proponents that microcredit not only supports rural poor to come out of poverty, it also empowers poor rural women in particular. This book is mainly grounded on research based on Bandipur Rural Municipality of Nepal. It has made the study of women from 3 settlements of Bandipur, who had availed microcredit facilities from some microcredit providing institutions or organizations in Bandipur. The data has been analyzed through qualitative data analysis under which both descriptive and explanatory methods. The data analysis is made on the basis of caste/ethnic group. The results showed that most of the females who availed the facility of microcredit finally got socioeconomic empowerment through acquiring the access to capital, control over resources, self-esteem, confidence level, decision making power, etc. Results are varied on Dalit, Janajati and Brahmin/Chhetri women. The findings showed that microcredit has significant impact on the upliftment of socio-economic empowerment of the borrowers of Bandipur. The income pattern of the respondent women has been changed. Daily wage earning and agricultural production were the main source of income before joining the program but after joining the microcredit program the sources of income shifted to small scale business, sale of livestock product and agricultural product. Entrepreneurship in microcredit beneficiary women has been increased. Apart from the changing income pattern, role of women in decision making about the resources mobilization for household activities, participation in societal affairs has also been increased. The economic dependency had restricted women in decision making power in all the spheres not only economical but also in other family and social affairs. But it has been changed now. Since, women are capable to generate regular income from their small enterprises; their dependency on male for money is reduced. Women's confidence and social status has increased after involvement in MC programs. Microcredit, though an effective poverty alleviating instrument, is not suitable for all categories of the poor. For those trapped in chronic poverty, no assets base to protect themselves from the countless webs of shocks, microcredit can be ineffective and sometimes counterproductive. Some cases of Dalit settlement have proved it.

Study on the role of microfinance in building up economic and democratic capacity of women in India.

This book discusses women-oriented microfinance initiatives in India and their articulation vis-à-vis state developmentalism and contemporary neo-liberal capitalism. It examines how these initiatives encourage economically disadvantaged rural women to make claims upon state-provided microcredit and connect with multiple state institutions and agencies, thereby reshaping their gendered identities. The author shows how Self-Help Group (SHG)-based microfinance institutions mobilise agency and create channels of empowerment for women as well as make them responsible for alleviating poverty for themselves and their families. The book also brings out the importance of factoring in women’s dissenting voices when they negotiate developmental projects at the grassroots level. Rich in empirical data, this volume will be useful to scholars and researchers of development studies, gender studies, economics, especially microeconomics, politics, public policy and governance.

The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh has been extending small loans to poor borrowers (primarily women) to promote self-employment and income generation since 1976. The apparent success of the Grameen Bank (that is, recruitment of clients, investment of loans, recovery rates on invested loans and profit margins) has made microcredit a new model for poverty alleviation and sustainable development. Anthropological research results on Grameen Bank lending to women presented in this book, however, illuminates the link between the success of the bank and debt-cycling of borrowers. The priority of earning profits to insure institutional economic viability caused Bank employees at the grassroots level to emphasize increasing the number of loans disbursed and loan recovery. By using the joint liability model of lending, the Bank workers and borrowing peers impose intense pressure on clients for timely repayment. Many borrowers maintain their regular payment schedules, but do so through a process of loan recycling (that is, pay off previous loans with new ones) that considerably increases borrower debt liability. The debt burdens on individual households in turn increase tension and anxiety among household members and produce unintended consequences for many clients.This book examines women borrowers' involvement with the microcredit program of the Grameen Bank, and the grassroots lending structure of the bank; it illustrates the implications of Grameen lending for the borrowers, their household members and bank workers. The focus of the study is on the processes of village-level microcredit operation; it addresses the realities of the day-to-day lives of women borrowers and bank workers and explains informant strategies for involving themselves in this microcredit scheme. The study is on the power dynamics of everyday lives of informants as they affect women borrowers' relationships within the household and the loan centers, and bank worker relationships within the loan center and the bank.