NEW YORK, 24. February, 2011: In response to a pelting critique (kanonade af kritik) from academics, economists and grassroots organizers worldwide, the 2011 State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report plans to address the controversies surrounding a development scheme that many believe to have failed, writes the news agency Inter Press Service Thursday.
The report, which is set to be released March 7 in Washington D.C. to great fanfare, will be presented by the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, a man who has earned himself a reputation as either the Superman of poverty-alleviation or the Judas of social change, depending on who you talk to.
Since Yunus accepted his million-dollar Nobel Prize award five years ago, a tempest of questions, censures (kritik) and confusions has battered at the doors of Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs).
“Micro Loans Do not Make a Macro Difference”
Farooque Chowd-hury, co-author of the 2007 United Nations Development Programme-sponsored report on Bangladesh, has written extensively on the failures of microcredit in the land of its inception (undfangelse), traveling to scores of villages to track the collapse of the program.
– Nothing pro-poor can be based on the philosophy of isolated house-holds competing with their peers (ligemænd/personer på samme stade), Chowdhury said, adding: – The poor have to unite and face the market’s ideology and allies, the onslaught (stormløb) of finance capital and capital’s design to subjugate (undertvinge) the poor.”
The celebrated Indian development journalist P.Sainath noted “the interest rates micro-indebted women are paying in India are far higher than commercial bank lending rates,” adding that debt will never amount to emancipation (økonomisk frigørelse).
– Microcredit was adopted by multinational institutions and advertised as a panacea (mirakelkur) for poverty alleviation, Omar Dahi, a professor of economic development at Hampshire College, told IPS.
– This fits within a neoliberal agenda of arguing that the state should withdraw from being active in development and that the private sector can solve the problem of poverty, he noted, adding: – It can not; in fact it exacerbates (forværrer) the problem.
– The most successful microcredit has been when it in fact was comple-mented (suppleret) with the state doing its job in terms of providing infrastructure, education and health care. The other alternative is workers and peasants cooperatives, but that of course, is not micro-credit, he concluded.
Microcredit also compliments (priser) the neoliberal supposition (antagelse) that the only way out of poverty is for the poor – particularly women, who already strain under the yoke (åg) of unpaid domestic labor – to work even harder for a pittance (ussel løn).
This does not address issues like the loss of land rights or the privatiza-tion of fundamental public services such as healthcare and education, in the absence of which poverty will only replicate itself in a vicious cycle.
Women: Double Victims of Debt
Because women supposedly have a higher loan repayment rate than men, and traditionally use their loans to support their families and communities rather than themselves, MFIs have found it both financially lucrative and highly beneficial to their public-image campaign to pursue women, “the poorest of the poor” in this endeavor.
However, various economists and researches have pointed out that women are easy prey for mammoth multinationals, and are particularly vulnerable to the often brutal loan-collection systems that MFIs enable.
Kilde: http://www.commondreams.org
Se også i u-landsnyts kalender om et møde 10.marts, hvor TV-dokumen-taristen Tom Heinemann for første gang møder det danske u-landsmiljø til debat efter filmen “Fanget i Mikrogæld” blev vist 31. januar – se på http://www.u-landsnyt.dk/kalender-indhold/debatm-de-med-tom-heinemann-mikrol-n-fattigdomsred
