Microfinance Gateway>Money Can't Buy Me Love?: Re-Evaluating Gender, Credit and Empowerment in Rural Bangladesh

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Library » Money Can't Buy Me Love?: Re-Evaluating Gender, Credit and Empowerment in Rural Bangladesh

Money Can't Buy Me Love?: Re-Evaluating Gender, Credit and Empowerment in Rural Bangladesh
1998, Kabeer, N.
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What are the insights gained from participatory evaluations?

The paper addresses the effectiveness of credit in addressing the needs and priorities of the poor and women's empowerment and uses evaluation data from the Small Enterprise Development Project (SEDP) to calibrate other methods

It sees that there are conflicting - both positive and negative - evaluations of the impacts of the same projects. The paper examines Bangladeshi examples of the effect of credit which indicate that:

Conflicting views on the effectiveness of credit are not primarily empirical conflicts
Evaluations are based on differing models of power in the context of gender relations
None of the evaluations have sought out the perspectives of the beneficiaries and participants - poor and rural women

The paper reports on the participatory evaluation of the SEDP, notes how the findings differ when they are gathered from the viewpoint of women loanees and underlines findings which show that:

Empowerment is a multidimensional process of change and impact relates to the situation prior to the loan in terms of personal achievement, intra-household relations, community standing and financial control
Qualitative outputs showed that the stress women placed on their own sense of enhanced self-worth was underplayed in previous evaluations while the point of individualized control over resources was overplayed
Indicators of empowerment should be contextualized to local goals
An automatic assumption of a direct correlation between empowerment and women's access to credit has to be ruled out. Empowerment should be seen as an expansion in the range of potential choices available to women
Women are not a homogenous category and are a highly diverse group of individuals with distinct personal histories affected by wider social changes

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24 May 2011



United Kingdom

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Publisher(s):
Institute of Development Studies