Micro-credit

How Is The Agrarian Distress In Maharashtra Affecting Women

23 December 2019 - by Manjima Misra

The plight of farm widows remains underreported due to lack of data, dearth of special focus on the gendered dimension of agrarian distress, policy paralysis and apathy of government. Women from suicide affected agricultural households suffer on multiple levels due to the burden of overwhelming (...)
No quick fixes for household debt crisis!

22 December 2019 - by Amali Wedagedara

Thanks to elections, rural debt problem has resurfaced as a prominent issue in the public domain. While some candidates have vowed to cancel the rural debt, others have pledged to find solutions to the problem and the agrarian crisis. Such accentuated attention from the people who seek power to (...)
Alert on the sophistication of illegitimate debt techniques via mobile telephony

8 November 2019 - by Eric Toussaint

In the era of widespread mobile telephony, we witnessed certain capitalist firms employing a sophistication of techniques to ensure the illegitimate debt of the lower classes. Kenya, a country of 50 million people, is considered to be at the forefront of mobile telephony and digitalisation. (...)
Trapped in a debt cycle

27 September 2019 - by Gihan D Chickera

The entrapment of rural communities, especially rural women, in a vicious debt cycle generated by thousands of unregulated microfinance organizations has reached epidemic proportions, affecting almost three million people island-wide. Once seen as an instrument of rural upliftment, microfinance (...)
Microfinance has been a nightmare for the global south. Sri Lanka shows that there is an alternative

12 September 2019 - by Ahilan Kadirgamar, Niyanthini Kadirgamar

The global hegemony of finance capital is based on burgeoning household debt accompanied by devastating dispossession. This is more evident in peripheral societies, where state investment in the rural economy is abandoned for the myth of expanding incomes through self-employment with the help (...)
Kenya: Perpetual Debt in the Silicon Savannah

2 September 2019 - by Emma Park, Kevin P. Donovan

Kenya’s poor were among the first to benefit from digital lending apps; now they call it slavery. Across conversations in Kenya’s pubs and WhatsApp groups, debt is on everyone’s mind. The speed and ease of access to credit through new mobile apps delivers cash to millions of Kenyans in need, but (...)
Lonmin’s murder, by money

6 June 2019 - by Patrick Bond

Autopsy reveals Lonmin—the British-South African company—corpse’s poisoning by microfinance, ‘development finance’ and corporate finance. The death of the 110-year old mining house Lonmin at a London shareholders meeting on 28 May occurred not through bankruptcy or nationalisation, as would have (...)
Sri Lanka: Does microfinance really empower women?

2 October 2018 - by Cat’s Eye

As women were deemed to be thrifty, able to manage with meagre resources and responsible borrowers, they became the targets for such predatory lending. We are witnessing large protests across the war-torn regions in the north and east, urging the Government to restrict the activities of (...)
Microfinance: Does it empower women?

18 September 2018 - by Independent collective of feminists

We are witnessing large protests across the war-torn regions in the north and east, urging the Government to restrict the activities of microfinance companies offering loans to poor women at exorbitantly high interest rates. Women’s groups in other parts of the country are also voicing their (...)
Debts and feminisms: an overview of the book project – first chapter

13 August 2018 - by Camille Bruneau

Feminism and the situation of women is an ever-growing concern for the CADTM network, which becomes almost unavoidable in the broad fight against domination(s). Women are indeed impacted by debt in several ways; as the main contractors of micro-credits, as the caretakers that have a higher (...)
South Asia: New creditors and new forms of debt peonage

17 April 2018 - by Nathan Legrand

The seventh CADTM South Asia regional workshop was successfully held in Colombo (Sri Lanka) from April 6 to April 8, 2018, with participants from Sri Lanka, but also from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, as well as from Japan, France and Belgium (for the CADTM International Secretariat). (...)
Sri Lanka: IFI’s, External debt and Microcredit

16 April 2018 - by B. Skanthakumar

The seventh CADTM South Asia regional workshop was successfully held in Colombo (Sri Lanka) from April 6 to April 8, 2018, with participants coming from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Japan, Belgium and France. Around forty delegates, most of them being representatives of social (...)
The Power of a Dollar

11 April 2018 - by Milford Bateman

Microcredit is nothing more than a socially validated way for financial elites to exploit the poor. hirty years ago the international development community was ecstatic. It had found the perfect market-affirming solution to poverty in developing countries: microcredit. The popularizer of (...)
We struggle against illegitimate public and private debt which are at the core of the capitalist system

6 April 2018 - by Eric Toussaint

The seventh CADTM South Asia regional workshop started in Colombo (Sri Lanka) on April 6, 2018, with participants coming from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Japan, Belgium and France. Around forty people, most of them being representatives of social movements (peasants’ (...)
Final declaration of the Bamako “Women, Debt and Microcredit” seminar

29 November 2017 - by CADTM International

We, women of the CADTM Africa network, from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Conakry, Mali, Morocco, Niger, Congo Democratic Republic, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Togo, as well as Argentina have met for the 3rd session of the seminar “Women, Debt and Microcredit” in (...)
Getting sucked into a quicksand of debt

16 July 2017 - by Meera Srinivasan

People in Batticaloa, one of the poorest districts in Sri Lanka, are badly hit by ‘predatory’ microfinance loans with exorbitant interest rates. “First, it was the tsunami that destroyed our community. Then came the war. Now, it’s microfinance.” That is how Jesudasan Rajitha describes the growing (...)
Micro-finance and Leasing: Today’s Loan Sharks

21 June 2017 - by Ahilan Kadirgamar

“In this context, it is not just the micro-finance lobby, but also the neo-liberal think tanks and economists that resist any moves to put a firm interest rate cap on such micro-finance schemes” It has taken the Central Bank many years to see what some of us have been pointing to since the war (...)
Bangladesh: Harsh effects of the Grameen Bank and other microcredit institutions on the rural population

11 April 2017 - by Eric Toussaint, Sushovan Dhar, Nathan Legrand, Abul Kalam Azad

Abul Kalam Azad works with Action Aid in Dhaka, Bangladesh and is also a member of the CADTM. He researches the impacts of microcredit and has conducted Participatory Action Research with the victims of such loans. How does microcredit work in Bangladesh? Of course, it would be most (...)
How microcredit has hurt the poor and destroyed informal business

4 January 2016 - by Milford Bateman

This is part of a series of articles The Conversation Africa is running on financial inclusion and micro credit and their role in economic development. Post-apartheid South Africa provides ample evidence of the debilitating trajectory of the microcredit movement. The expansion of microcredit (...)
From Zorro to Zombie: the rise and fall of the microcredit movement

28 December 2015 - by Milford Bateman

Thirty years ago, the international development community was in a state of high excitement. The perfect market-affirming solution to poverty in developing countries had apparently been found. Microcredit, also known as microfinance. This involved giving micro-loans to the poor that allowed (...)
Solidarity with microcredit’s victims in Ouarzazate city (south of Morocco)

13 February 2014 - by ATTAC/CADTM Maroc

Press release Unjust conviction of Amina Morad and Benacer Ismaïni, 2 activists of the Association for Defending Victims of microcredit in Ouarzazate : 1 year in prison and a fine of 30000 MAD and 10000 MAD for Inmaa a microcredit organization as compensation. The convicted activists have 10 (...)
The unfulfilled promises of microcredit: some new evidence

31 January 2012 - by Stéphanie Jacquemont

Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize laureate and founder of the Grameen Bank, made the promise of a world without poverty thanks to the magic of microfinance and social business . Since the main problem of poor people was, he said, that they are denied access to capital and markets, the way (...)
Microcredit, macro issues

21 October 2006 - by Walden Bello

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus, regarded as the father of microcredit, comes at a time when microcredit has become something like a religion to many of the powerful, rich and famous. Hillary Clinton regularly speaks about going to Bangladesh, Yunus’s homeland, and being (...)