International development is an industry of fads and trends, perpetually jumping at the next big thing, searching for the magic bullet that will end global poverty. Since the United Nations made achieving gender equality a sustainable development goal, the myriad of actors that fuel the development machine have latched onto the expression ‘empowering women’, adapting what could otherwise be called ‘development as usual’ to a gender-conscious agenda. Whether well-intentioned or merely a way for development agencies to virtue signal their endorsement of women’s human rights, the buzz around female empowerment risks adding women to the growing list of fetishized groups whose structural oppression is met with billions of dollars in capital and misplaced interventions.
The embrace of female empowerment shows that across all sectors of the development industry, from national governments to the ever-proliferating non-profit sector, there is recognition that women are systematically disadvantaged under the patriarchy– the system of social organization that privileges men at the expense of other gender identities. But recognizing patriarchal oppression does not mean development actors understand it, nor do they necessarily have the ability to solve it. Over the past twenty years, development has undergone gender mainstreaming– meaning that gender-based analysis now informs every phase of intervention design, from its initial research through planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. On the face of it, gender mainstreaming seems positive. Firms, NGOs, and governments no longer assume that development benefits everyone equally, and gender equality is approaching the status of a universally shared value.
But mainstreaming has its limitations, and its applications in development show that rather than achieving justice for women worldwide, development actors have taken their preconceived frameworks, ideologies, and assumptions, thrown gender into the mix, and rebranded themselves as enablers of women’s empowerment. Experiments with microfinance and productive assets targeting poor women in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka show that gender mainstreaming in development has not only failed to meaningfully address patriarchal oppression but in many cases, has made the lives of poor women worse.
Microfinance is the practice of giving small loans to individuals who cannot put up collateral because they live in poverty. Development economists believe that because the poor have few material possessions, they cannot take out loans, invest in productive assets, or become economically self-sufficient. They are trapped in the ‘poverty cycle’. Small amounts of money mean a small amount of risk for the lending bank, but for individuals in poverty, it can be the difference between just getting by and becoming a successful entrepreneur. With a microloan, people can start small businesses out of their homes, and earn a steady income under a bottom-up development model that stimulates economic growth. When it emerged in 1976, the excitement over microfinance was global, and its operations only grew in scope as neoliberalism became the favoured development model after the 1990s– promoting private sector development, minimal state intervention, and the deregulation of markets worldwide. In 2006, Dr. Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank, won the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering microfinance as a gender-inclusive development model with the potential to achieve economic growth and gender equality simultaneously. But when examined through a feminist lens, the claim to ‘women’s empowerment’ is shown to be insidious.
Anthropologist Lamia Karim conducted research with microloan recipients from the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and found that instead of empowering women, microloans often enhanced their vulnerability to gender-based violence. The Grameen Bank boasts of creating a “bootstrap capitalism”, where poor women are empowered to lift themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps– through independent hard work. 98% of its borrowers are women, and their loan repayment rate is 98%. For Dr. Yunus, this rate proves that when given the opportunity, Bangladeshi women make successful entrepreneurs. As the International Coalition on Women and Credit stated at the Fourth World Conference on Women, “poor women are bankable”, meaning that they have economic potential that has previously been overlooked by financial institutions. Poor women’s labour can be monetized and made a means to develop, but women’s entry into the workforce is rarely seen as having intrinsic value. It’s somewhat unsurprising, then, that the means by which Grameen Bank achieves its 98% loan repayment rate increases vulnerability and violence for Bangladeshi women.
As an assistant manager at the Grameen Bank told Karim herself, “Grameen Bank is not a charity, it’s a commercial enterprise.” Before a woman receives a microloan, employees from the bank take note of all saleable items in her home, such as pots, chairs, tables, beds, and livestock. An inability to repay one’s loan results in the seizure of these items. To prevent this, all that women have to do is break even on their loans– a seemingly reasonable ask. But kinship obligations for Bangladeshi women dictate that they must give their loans to male relatives when demanded. Loans are not truly their own, but the onus to repay is. Should a woman default on her loan, the bank relies on rural codes of honour to shame the woman into repaying it. In a context where women’s property rights are insecure and women are emblems of family honour, the Grameen Bank instrumentalizes female vulnerability to achieve its commercial goals– all the while, disempowering the very people they claim to help.
The distribution of productive assets to Tamil women in post-war Sri Lanka is another example of misplaced interventions exacerbating women’s vulnerability and victimization. Productive assets, whether tangible or intangible, generate income and yield financial returns for their owners. In a vacuum, donating productive assets to poor women could be economically empowering, but political scientist Nimmi Gowrinathan found that in Northern Sri Lanka, international development has feminized poverty and placed Tamil women at higher risk of sexual violence.
Northern Sri Lanka has been militarized since the end of the Sri Lankan civil war (1986-2009), and international NGOs have been active there since the 2004 Tsunami, which took the lives of over 200,000 people. Under militarization, Tamil women and ex-combatants of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam (LTTE), the Tamil insurgent group that fought against the Sri Lankan State, regularly experience sexual violence perpetrated by the Sri Lankan military. Non-profit actors responded to this problem with small-scale projects that claimed to ‘empower’ rape victims by giving them feminized productive assets, such as sewing machines, livestock, gardening equipment, and beauty parlour training. These assets yield insufficient income to end Tamil women’s poverty, but more alarmingly, they can be dangerous for the very subjects they claim to empower. Because productive assets are given to victims of sexual violence, they signal to military officials that these women reported their crimes. These interventions fail to empower women because international NGOs do not understand the complex social, political, and economic context of Tamil women, nor do they see Tamil women on their own terms– as political actors with agency and aspiration, beyond narratives of victimization. Miscalculated interventions heighten their vulnerability to gender-based state violence and depoliticize their existence in detrimental ways.
In Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, development claims to empower women, but in practice, it applies the same depoliticizing, economic interventions that equate female oppression under patriarchy to economic disadvantage. Economic dependency on men and exclusion from the labour market can be a symptom of patriarchal oppression, but giving women assets is not inherently empowering, and if not carefully done, these interventions cause more problems for women than they solve. A generous interpretation of development’s relationship with feminism is that it does not understand it and therefore despite good intentions, fails to produce radical interventions that dismantle the patriarchal structures that oppress women. A less generous interpretation is that purplewashing is rampant within development. The stated commitments to gender equality are lip service paid to women in developing states, while the interventions that follow prioritize capitalist development, only tinted purple.
Edited by Jamie Silverman
Clio is in her fourth year at McGill, majoring in Honours International Development and minoring in Hispanic Studies and Social Studies of Medicine. As a staff writer for Catalyst, she most enjoys writing about social movements, political violence, Indigenous rights, and feminism.