Mikrokredite, Rendite und Geschlecht: von zuverlässigen armen Frauen und finanzieller Inklusion

Abstract

Founded on a discourse which assumes a feminized high repayment morale, the article discusses microcredits as a gendered instrument for the inclusion of poor women in India into the financial market. Microfinancing is analysed at the intersection of four power regimes: the international financial market, development policies, nation-states and their social policies, and reproduction and production regimes at the local and household levels. Cross-cutting these power regimes, are the hierarchical social relations of class, caste, race, gender and the post-colonial North-South divide. The expansion of microcredit lending in India was legitimised by development aid organisations as a means to proverty reduction and women's empowerment. However, not only do microcredits create cycles of debt, they restructure the local economy and reproduction and are implicated in a neoliberal shift of social responsibilities from the nation-state to the poor. Furthermore, as a result of the commercialisation of financial services and, thus, their subjugation under the rationale of profit and growth, in 2010 the microcredit industry in India crashed. Following, this article highlights the paradoxical and ambivalent effects of microcredits on poverty management and on women’s empowerment in the Indian context.