Questioning virtuous spirals: micro-finance and women's empowerment in Africa
✍ Scribed by Linda Mayoux
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1999
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 236 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0954-1748
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
The Micro-credit Summit in Washington in February 1997 presented an extremely attractive vision of increasing numbers of expanding, ®nancially self-sustainable micro-®nance programmes 1 reaching large numbers of women borrowers and making a signi®cant contribution to global poverty alleviation. Funding for micro-®nance programmes targeting large numbers of women has recently been signi®cantly increased under initiatives by CGAP and its member agencies. 2 Those promoting micro-®nance for women see it as initiating a `virtuous upward spiral' of economic, social and political empowerment. However parallel to this enthusiasm some researchers based on research in South Asia, particularly Bangladesh, have questioned the degree to which micro-®nance services in fact bene®t women. 3 Some have argued that for some women in some contexts programmes may even be disempowering, reducing women to unpaid debt collectors for development agencies and increasing tensions within the family (Goetz and Sen Gupta, 1996). Some argue strongly that micro-®nance programmes divert resources and/or the attention of women themselves from other more eective strategies for empowerment (Ebdon, 1995). These gender considerations have added to recent questioning of the usefulness