Micro-Credit, Empowerment, and Agency: Re-Evaluating the Discourse

@article{Parmar2003MicroCreditEA,
  title={Micro-Credit, Empowerment, and Agency: Re-Evaluating the Discourse},
  author={Aradhana Parmar},
  journal={Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'{\'e}tudes du d{\'e}veloppement},
  year={2003},
  volume={24},
  pages={461 - 476}
}
  • A. Parmar
  • Published 1 January 2003
  • Sociology
  • Canadian Journal of Development Studies / Revue canadienne d'études du développement
ABSTRACT The discussion around gender and development has come to focus on the “empowerment” of women, and has become quite central to development discourse. The “empowerment” of women also increasingly appears among the stated objectives of NGOs and other development agencies, to the extent that efforts to “empower women” have come to be an expected component of any credible development project or strategy. By critically assessing the discourse of empowerment as it pertains to the micro-credit… 
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    Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goals
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References

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Nongovernmental Organizations, Micro-Credit, and Empowerment of Women
Empowerment of women by means of micro-credit-based income generation programs is a new orthodoxy in the development discourse. The first part of the article appraises this phenomenon in a broader…
Participatory Learning for Women's Empowerment in Micro‐Finance Programmes: Negotiating Complexity, Conflict and Change
summary Micro‐finance programmes for women are currently promoted not only as a strategy for poverty alleviation but also for women's empowerment. However, the complexity of empowerment itself and…
Conflicts Over Credit: Re-Evaluating the Empowerment Potential of Loans to Women in Rural Bangladesh
Testing the tools of development: credit programmes, loan involvement, and women's empowerment.
This study finds that income generation programs should not focus on women's labor as a means of empowerment. Empowerment should be directed to women's direct involvement in selling and accounting…
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This article challenges the recent uncritical enthusiasm for the potential of micro-finance institutions to reduce poverty. It is argued that, although understanding about how to design anti-poverty…
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This paper addresses the emergence of microcredit programmes as a preferred strategy for poverty alleviation world-wide. Taking the paradigmatic case of Nepal, it engages a genealogical approach to…
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Micro‐Credit Programme Evaluation: A Critical Review
summary Micro‐credit programmes have emerged as an antipoverty instrument in many low‐income countries. They target the poor, especially women, with financial services to help them become…
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