by Sarah Lindon
WomenEnews carries an interesting opinion piece today on the big claims often made for the role of microcredit schemes - such as Mohammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank - in women’s empowerment.
Economists Susan Feiner and Drucilla Barker argue that “microcredit is not an open door to broader and broadening opportunities” for women, and does nothing to change the structural conditions that create poverty.
Women and men have different experiences with work and entrepreneurship because a gender division of labor in most cultures assigns men to paid work outside the home and women to unpaid labor in the home. Consequently, women’s paid work is constrained by domestic responsibilities. They either work part time, or they combine paid and unpaid work by working at home. Microcredit encourages women to work at home doing piecework... Home workers—mostly women and children—often work long hours for very poor pay in hazardous conditions, with no legal protections.
They contrast the Grameen Bank’s work with that of the Indian Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA), an organisation run by poor women for poor women, which works for structural and political empowerment alongside economic measures. It trains women to understand both their own rights and national policies, enabling them to organise and engage with local political systems to secure their livelihoods. It also increases their access to social security such as health and child care.
I was lucky enough to hear SEWA’s Union Leader, Geeta, speak at a London seminar on her first ever trip outside India, at the beginning of March. She told the story of how the organisation helped her struggle in the face of eviction from a marketplace which was being cleared for gentrification. With SEWA’s assistance, she built a local movement of women to challenge the authorities, compel them to act within the law, and to find a new location for women to sell their goods. Alongside the important financial outcomes of their efforts, the women gained confidence, dignity, and a voice where they had previously had no say in developments that affected them.
Related articles:
Patricia Daniel on how EU trade agreements are affecting women in Africa; Tony Curzon Price on the problems of seeing economics as “the soulful science”; Sarah Lindon on the trouble with economic solutions to empower women.
