Paying back comes first: why repayment means more than business in rural Senegal
Author(s)
Amelia Duffy-TumaszEditor(s)
Sweetman, CarolinePublication date
2009-07-01Country
Senegal
Metadata
Show full item recordJournal
Gender & DevelopmentDocument type
Journal articleLanguage
EnglishDescription
Giving small loans to women has become a mainstay in development practitioners' toolkits. Using data collected for Oxfam America's Saving for Change (SFC) project, this article argues that repayment of micro-credit cannot be used as a measure of micro-enterprise development per se. Instead, repayment signals the presence of peer pressure, loan sharing and remittance payments in the studied setting. This conclusion is borne through an ethnographic approach, which focuses on who accesses loans, how people who access loans use them, and how borrowers mobilise resources for repayment. The research indicates that future studies should use ethnography in tandem with other approaches to evaluation, and concludes with implications for an agenda seeking to forward women's workers rights. This article is hosted by our co-publisher Taylor & Francis. For the full table of contents for this and previous issues of this journal, please visit the <a href="http://www.genderanddevelopment.org">Gender and Development</a> website.Pages
11ISSN
1355-2074EISSN
1364-9221ae974a485f413a2113503eed53cd6c53
10.1080/13552070903009668