Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh

PREFACE

vii I am a child of Western development discourses. Growing up, I would often respond to the question “tell me about your country” by saying that “Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries of the world.” Western discourses of poverty defined how I had learned to apprehend myself, the “third world” and its realities, and human possibilities. I grew up and came of age against the backdrop of the Green Revolution, the Bangladeshi freedom war of 1971, the famine of 1974, and the global transformations of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s that introduced neoliberal policies and market deregulations worldwide. My unlearning, which is an ongoing process, began in the 1980s as I encountered political literature about alternatives to the dominant development paradigm. My interest in development was triggered by Michel Foucault’s work on power and knowledge and by Arturo Escobar’s Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (1995). I am not a development anthropologist; I am an anthropologist of development. Bangladesh has one of the largest NGO sectors in the world, a situation that has been praised by the World Bank as a catalyst for change. It is home to the Grameen Bank and Building Resources Across Communities (BRAC), two of the largest microfinance institutions in the world. Hence, it makes sense to study the effects of microfinance from the paradigmatic site of the microfinance industry, Bangladesh. Microcredit is the extension of small loans, usually between $100 and $300, to poor people to start incomegenerating enterprises.This book is a study of the discourses, practices, and policies of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner Grameen Bank and three of the leading nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Bangladesh: Building Resources Across Communities (formerly known as Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee [BRAC]), Proshika Human Development Center (Proshika), and Association for Social Advancement (ASA). In particular, Preface viii Preface I am interested in the social consequences on women’s lives as a result of their involvement in microfinance programs. My research interest in microcredit (which is now called microfinance), NGOs, and gender relations began in 1995 as a graduate student at Rice University. In 1996, I spent two months in Bangladesh conducting an initial field survey of my dissertation topic. During this time, I worked as a researcher for a local human rights NGO. This experience gave me some access to the internal workings of a small NGO, its connections to global funding operations and agenda-setting priorities, and to the playing out of those concerns at the local level. I had the opportunity to meet Nobel laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank in Dhaka. The following year, I returned to Bangladesh to conduct research for this book over a period of eighteen months. It was my immersion in ethnography for an extended period that gave me the opportunity to critically apprehend how dominant development discourses and practices restructured certain forms of knowledge and actions as legitimate and acceptable, while delegitimizing and obscuring others. What brought me to the study of microfinance and gender was a puzzle about rural women’s entrepreneurship and economic empowerment. Bangladeshisoneof themosteconomicallydepressedcountriesintheworld, and yet the Grameen Bank and the other three NGOs I studied all boasted a 98 percent rate of loan recovery. Either rural Bangladeshi women were all becoming successful mini-entrepreneurs through these microfinance NGOs, or there was a hidden story behind these high recovery rates. I was provoked by the following questions: What gave one of the poorest countries in the world some of the most creditworthy clients? What does it take to empower women? Is money enough? Rejecting the moralistic discourse that the poor pay back because of a natural correlation between honesty and poverty, I felt instead that there was a complex picture behind these high repayment numbers. I chose Bangladesh for my research because I wanted to discover the story behind the rhetoric of these NGOs. The initial research was conducted between 1998 and 1999, with follow -up research in 2007. During these years, I kept pace with the trends within the Bangladeshi microfinance industry. More important, I am from Bangladesh, I speak the language fluently, and I have social networks that connect me to the local research and activist communities. In my visits to Bangladesh, I noticed that microfinance had become one of the most regularized aspects of development programs. In order to update my earlier findings, in 2007 I conducted a small study of female borrowers of the [3.144.109.5] Project MUSE (2024...