Demystifying Micro-Credit

This article is an ethnographic study of the effects of micro-credit on gender relations in rural Bangladesh. Focusing on the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh and three other leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in the country, I analyze the role of gender in the expansion of globalization and neoliberalism in Bangladesh. The Grameen Bank has become a global symbol of poor women's empowerment and is celebrated for its 98 percent loan recovery. In this article, I examine some of the NGO tactics behind the loan recovery programs. In particular, I examine how Bangladeshi rural women's honor and shame are instrumentally appropriated by micro-credit NGOs in the furtherance of their capitalist interests.

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