ABSTRACT
The promoters of micro-credits promise to deliver us from poverty and emancipate women. In fact, it is the opposite that happens: we find ourselves trapped in a spiral of over-indebtedness, launching infeasible micro-projects that, instead of keeping our heads above water, push us deeper into poverty, stress, humiliation and violence. The world's leading financial institutions and investment houses were soon falling over themselves to work with, and profit from, the largest and most profitable microcredit institutions. For such local alternatives to find a stronger foothold and to contribute more systematically to national and local economic development will, however, require broader changes in regional financial architectures capable of promoting development finance and of propelling domestic resource mobilisation in the South. Crucially, this negative outcome leads us back to the demand by neoliberal policymakers after 1980 that financial intermediation should be overwhelmingly the responsibility of profit-driven private sector institutions.
