ABSTRACT
Microcredit, especially in developing countries, has been championed as a way both to alleviate poverty and to empower women.With the year 2005 dedicated as the United Nations Year of Microcredit, followed by the awarding of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, the most well known of microcredit ventures, microcredit as an engine of economic development has achieved international approbation from NGOs, multilateral organizations, donors, governments and the general public. As a development strategy, microcredit meshes well with neo-liberal ideologies that champion individual initiative, self-reliance, and ‘pulling yourself up by your bootstraps’, squarely putting the onus of development on the individual without challenging the distribution of wealth, patriarchy, racial and ethnic discrimination, and other structural sources of inequality. Incorporating women into microcredit programmes fits neatly with the objectives of what has become known as the ‘women in development’ paradigm, notably set forth by Boserup (1970), which promotes Western-style modernization. Microcredit programmes encouraging women to develop market-oriented microenterprises have been seen as a way to further national goals of economic development while enabling women to better provide for their families’ needs.
