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4 books match the query 'Microfinance'

cover of A Critical History of Poverty Finance: Colonial Roots and Neoliberal Failures

A Critical History of Poverty Finance

Colonial Roots and Neoliberal Failures

Nick

Pluto Press, 2022

A comprehensive historical tracing of how the contemporary finance-poverty-development nexus emerged.

'The definitive account of the history of poverty finance' - Susanne Soederberg

Finance, mobile, and digital technologies - or 'fintech' - are being heralded in the world of development by the likes of the IMF and World Bank as a silver bullet in the fight against poverty. But should we believe the hype?

A Critical History of Poverty Finance demonstrates how newfangled 'digital financial inclusion' efforts suffer from the same essential flaws as earlier iterations of neoliberal 'financial inclusion.' Relying on artificially created markets that simply aren't there among the world's most disadvantaged economic actors, they also reinforce existing patterns of inequality and uneven development, many of which date back to the colonial era.

Bernards offers an astute analysis of the current fintech fad, contextualized through a detailed colonial history of development finance, that ultimately reveals the neoliberal vision of poverty alleviation for the pipe dream it is.

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cover of Fiery Dragons: Banks, Moneylenders and Microfinance in Burma

Fiery Dragons

Banks, Moneylenders and Microfinance in Burma

Sean Turnell

National University of Singapore Press, 2009

This book tells the story of Burma's financial system - of its banks, moneylenders and 'microfinanciers' - from colonial times to the present day. It argues that Burma's financial system matters, and that the careful study of this system can tell us something more general about Burma - not least about how the richest country in Southeast Asia at the dawn of the twentieth century, became the poorest at the dawn of the twenty-first. While financial systems and institutions matter in all countries, Turnell argues that they especially count in Burma as events in the financial and monetary sphere have been unusually, spectacularly, prominent in Burma's turbulent modern history. The story of Burma's financial system and its players is one that has shaped the country. It is a dramatic story of interest beyond the confines of economics and development studies.
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cover of Making Women Pay: Microfinance in Urban India

Making Women Pay

Microfinance in Urban India

Smitha Radhakrishnan

Duke University Press, 2022

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.
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cover of Microfinance and Its Discontents: Women in Debt in Bangladesh

Microfinance and Its Discontents

Women in Debt in Bangladesh

Lamia Karim

University of Minnesota Press, 2010

A feminist critique of the much-lauded microcredit process in Bangladesh

In 2006 the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh won the Nobel Peace Prize for its innovative microfinancing operations. This path-breaking study of gender, grassroots globalization, and neoliberalism in Bangladesh looks critically at the Grameen Bank and three of the leading NGOs in the country. Amid euphoria over the benefits of microfinance, Lamia Karim offers a timely and sobering perspective on the practical, and possibly detrimental, realities for poor women inducted into microfinance operations.

In a series of ethnographic cases, Karim shows how NGOs use social codes of honor and shame to shape the conduct of women and to further an agenda of capitalist expansion. These unwritten policies subordinate poor women to multiple levels of debt that often lead to increased violence at the household and community levels, thereby weakening women’s ability to resist the onslaught of market forces.

A compelling critique of the relationship between powerful NGOs and the financially strapped women beholden to them for capital, this book cautions us to be vigilant about the social realities within which women and loans circulate—realities that often have adverse effects on the lives of the very women these operations are meant to help.
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