Obtain some information and write a note about women's micro credit groups
Answers
In recent years, microcredit has dominated popular attention, especially among practitioners and scholars who are interested in ways to improve the economic and social conditions of the “third world”. However, much of the literature on microcredit comes from advocates who are hastily enthusiastic about its potential to reduce poverty, mitigate gender inequities and improve the overall healthiness of impoverished communities in poor countries. As such, a great deal of the literature on microcredit is promotional. Many are anecdotal stories of individual women and men working to build opportunities to empower and enrich themselves despite difficult circumstances and meager resources. This has led to an injudicious bias about microcredit’s power to correct social ills associated with poverty and about its ability to permanently abate the strangleholds of pauperism. Take for example the passage below from Smith and Thurman (2007) authors of A Billion Bootstraps:
“Fatoumata Monomata lives in Burkina Faso, one the poorest countries in Africa where average life expectancy is only 44 years. Since childhood, she has known about a terrible disease called malaria, but she and her neighbors did not know how it was spread, how to protect themselves, when it would strike, and what kind of medicine would help. Malaria, a ruthless killer, swept through her village repeatedly, stealing the lives of countless children. Fatoumata feared for her children, but she had no idea how to protect them. She obtained a microloan along with information about nutrition and malaria from Freedom Hunger. She used the loan to buy nuts and potatoes to sell. She increased her income enough to buy medicine, insecticide-treated mosquito nets, and nutritious food for her children. With her loans, she was able to get a wagon, which further increases her profits. Fatoumata shares her wagon and new knowledge with her neighbors so they too can improve their incomes and health.” (p.84)
These kinds of accounts are very common and easily found in books and technical reports on microcredit as well as the web pages of microcredit organizations such as Grameen Bank, ACCION, FINCA (Foundation for International Community Assistance), and PRIDE (Promotion of Rural Initiatives and Development Enterprises). The power of these testimonies have inspired hundreds of millions of dollars in monetary donations from major global financial institutions (such as Citigroup, AIG, Visa, The United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) etc.) and from individuals interested in microdevelopment efforts in “third world” countries.
Academic research on microcredit is burgeoning in the fields of economics, development and demography. Since the early 1990s, there has been spate of theoretical and empirical articles on microcredit. Many support microcredit as a development strategy while a growing number of others are critical and suspicious about microcredit’s ability to correct longstanding social ills and improve national economies. For example, Scully (2004) raises several important questions about microcredit’s ability to fill the void of formal wage work and empower women within existing patriarchal structures. Likewise, Goetz and Gupta (1996, p.45) and Hanak (2000, p. 313) raised concerns about the disproportionate burden women bear in repaying loans they may not have full control over.