Microfinance and Empowerment

By bringing together academics and practitioners, this seminar hopes to pursue and encourage further reflection in the following issues based on both field experience of the participants as also from a theoretical perspective :

How does microfinance act as a vehicle for empowering people ? The seminar does not aim to define the “best practices”. It seems more relevant to identify the strengths and weakness of each methodology and its conditions of implementation. It is likely that methodologies could vary in relation to the type of empowerment desired, type of target population, local socio-economic context, etc.

Though defined as an “instrument” usually, evidence suggests that monetary and financial practices are strongly embedded in social and cultural practices. Microfinance services, irrespective of their performance, do not replace informal practices Empowerment or improved access to power is a means and an end per se. It goes beyond Microfinance activities because it deals with social change process . This concept is used more and more often by media, political classes and NGO activists as well. It is considered as a way to respond to the oppression, injustice or exploitation of disadvantaged people, i.e. the poorest, the women or the scheduled castes and tribes. Though widely used, this fashionable concept is seldom the subject of research studies. The growing popularity of the concept, paradoxically, has led to a vague and unclear definition of empowerment. Different people use this concept in different ways.

Theoretically, microfinance may well initiate a “virtuous spiral” of economic, social and even political empowerment and, consequently, may appear as a means to increase the capabilities of vulnerable people. But how do things stand in practice ? Available results of impact studies call for circumspection. Microfinance can free vulnerable people of certain links of dependence, but can also forge new kinds of dependence and subordination, thereby strengthening disparities.

In the field of microfinance, the issue of empowerment has been analyzed, especially from the perspective of gender. Much research has demonstrated that microfinance should include a gender focus in order to have an effective impact in terms of gender poverty and empowerment. It is true that all over the world, inequities suffered by women are stronger than those suffered by men. However, an overemphasis on women as a specific microfinance target population has meant lesser focus on other underprivileged and vulnerable groups. In many contexts, aside from the variety of forms that gender inequalities can take, others forms of disparities and injustices, such as those linked to social classes, races, castes, tribes, etc. do exist. Any study of empowerment must consider the interaction and interrelation between these different underprivileged categories. The key goal of this seminar will be to focus on such interrelations