In 2006 the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh won the Nobel Peace Prize for its innovative microfinancing operations. This path-breaking study of gender, grassroots globalization, and neoliberalism in Bangladesh looks critically at the Grameen Bank and three of the leading NGOs in the country. Amid euphoria over the benefits of microfinance, Lamia Karim offers a timely and sobering perspective on the practical, and possibly detrimental, realities for poor women inducted into microfinance operations.
In a series of ethnographic cases, Karim shows how NGOs use social codes of honor and shame to shape the conduct of women and to further an agenda of capitalist expansion. These unwritten policies subordinate poor women to multiple levels of debt that often lead to increased violence at the household and community levels, thereby weakening women’s ability to resist the onslaught of market forces.
A compelling critique of the relationship between powerful NGOs and the financially strapped women beholden to them for capital, this book cautions us to be vigilant about the social realities within which women and loans circulate—realities that often have adverse effects on the lives of the very women these operations are meant to help.
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Best Book on Microfinance This is groundbreaking work. It reveals that underneath all the hype and cheerleading for microfinance, there is a different, and less hopeful, story. This book is set in the home country of Mohammed Yunus, who received the Nobel Peace Prize, along with his Grameen Bank, for developing microfinance. Karim shows that microfinance in Bangladesh has really served mainly as a way for those who run microfinance institutions to make money and status, while the women who are supposed to be served…
Good study, but could have been more balanced… Lamia is a talented young scholar and this book is an important addition to the literature on microfinance (MF). However, it is one-sided and often ignores the many benefits of MF found not just in Bangladesh but across the 50 plus nations where it has spread, including right here in the US (Manhattan, Nebraska, and other US cities now have fledgling Grameen Bank offices). Why one-sided? For example, in her recommendations she speaks of a “governmental oversight in the interest rates the NGOs…
A Must Read As a long time proponent of microfinance, I was very skeptical about this book. I had to read the first 3 chapters for school, but ended up reading the whole book. The book provides a difficult yet realistic aspect of microfinance in a country where NGOs have taken on the role of local governance. The author, having carried out her research in Bangladesh, exposed the “other side” of microfinance that we often do not hear of through different narratives, many of which are disturbingly true. If…