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Sri Lanka: Microfinance debt trap: Still awaiting reprieve

4 May 2021 - by Maheesha Mudugamuwa

Thousands of innocent villagers, especially in the Northern, Eastern, and North Central Provinces are holding protests to raise a collective cry against the longstanding issues related to the microfinance debt trap that had claimed the lives of (...)
A grim new year for debt-trapped rural women in Sri Lanka

16 April 2021 - by Meera Srinivasan

M. Champa Irangani is in no mood to celebrate ‘Avurudu’, or New Year, the biggest annual festival that Sri Lanka’s majority Sinhalese community observes mid-April, while Tamils celebrate the Tamil New Year around the same time. “The New Year will (...)
Debt-driven suicides continue unabated in Sri Lanka

3 April 2021 - by Piyumi Fonseka

Sometimes a loan obtained to save a life can end up taking another life, in the debt-stricken villages of Sri Lanka. A 24-year-old mother killed her child and committed suicide two months ago due to her inability to repay a loan of Rs. 400, 000 (...)
A movement for a moratory on the debt of region affected by Wakashio

2 April 2021 - by Stefan Gua

A movement to demand a moratorium on the debts of households and businesses in the disaster areas of Wakashio. This is the request of Lasanble Solider Mahébourg / lakot Sid-Es. They were some fifteen demonstrators of this collective gathered in (...)
The bitter realities behind the Hingurakgoda satyagraha

2 April 2021 - by Amalini de Sayrah

On International Women’s Day (IWD) 2021, in a small tent located at the Polonnaruwa Raja Sabha Mandapaya, women sat down to begin a satyagraha against the microfinance debt that has crippled rural economies and left them helpless. Current (...)
Sri Lanka’s household debt and the pound of flesh

15 March 2021 - by Amali Wedagedara

The complexity of the agrarian debt problem and the attractiveness of the idea of debt abolition made the cancellation of microfinance debt a popular campaign slogan during the Sri Lankan presidential election in November 2019. Women affected by (...)
Debt: an infernal device at the heart of the feminization of migration

4 March 2021 - by Christine Vanden Daelen

Inducing everywhere in its wake a social reproduction crisis, i.e. a dispossession of the resources necessary to the reproduction of life, debt plays a central role in women’s migratory paths. It forces them to leave their homes and conditions (...)
Development or Underdevelopment?

4 February 2021 - by Amali Wedagedara

The Sri Lankan economy revealed a principal contradiction during the last two weeks. The Colombo Stock Market was becoming one of the best performing stock markets in the world. In parallel, the real Sri Lankan economy is collapsing. A suicide (...)
World Bank: Investigate Cambodia’s Micro-Loans

5 January 2021 - by Human Rights Watch

The World Bank Group should investigate alleged coerced land sales and other rights abuses linked to predatory lending and over-indebtedness in the micro-loan sector, Human Rights Watch said today. These longstanding problems have worsened (...)
Micro credit : empowerment or victimisation?

10 December 2020 - by Sushovan Dhar, Sankha Subhra Biswas

The pandemic and the ensuing lock-down has hit India like never before. A report by K Chandra Shekhar and Kasif Mansorr from Azim Premji University states “According to the ILO report, in India, more than 400 million informal workers may get (...)
Debt, Distress, Suicide

17 August 2020 - by Ahilan Kadirgamar

When someone takes their own life, it is the ultimate consequence of great distress. But the specific causes for such tragic endings are never clear, and are often compounded by a myriad set of factors. How does one understand the struggles of a (...)
Tackle the Household Debt Pandemic- Cancel Debt! Create Common Credit!

30 May 2020 - by Amali Wedagedara, Ermiza Tegal

The onset of island-wide curfew since mid-March delivered a blow to the economy of working people. Millions of working people lost their jobs, or had wage cuts. Small farmers could not sell their harvest or sell it at a decent price. Fishers (...)
“Life and Blood of our country, but we only have debt!”

5 March 2020 - by Amali Wedagedara

More than 700 women from 14 districts came to Colombo on February 27 to protest against government inaction on the microfinance debt crisis. Recalling a popular election slogan during the last Presidential election they demanded that the promise (...)
MONLAR: Micro credit sharks drove 200 poor borrowers to suicide during last three years

2 March 2020 - by Rathindra Kuruwita

About 200 people had committed suicide, during the last three years or so, as they were unable to pay back the micro-credit loans and many of those organisations had obtained the services of village thugs to recover money Chinthaka Rajapakshe, (...)
The Microcredit Scam

20 February 2020 - by Nathan Legrand

The following text is a slightly adapted version from a presentation given at the 8th CADTM South Asia workshop (Colombo, Sri Lanka, 18-19 February 2020). Microcredit: A Success Story? In its modern form, microcredit has supposedly been (...)
Feminisation of micro credit

20 February 2020 - by Nalini Ratnarajah

The eighth CADTM South Asia regional workshop was successfully held in Colombo (Sri Lanka) from February 18-19, 2020 with participants from Sri Lanka, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco, Belgium and France. Around forty delegates, representing (...)
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 (...)
No quick fixes to solve household debt crisis!

22 December 2019 - by Amali Wedagedara

Thanks to elections, rural debt problem has reappeared as a prominent issue in the public domain. While some candidates have vouched to cancel the rural debt, others have pledged to find solutions to rural indebtedness and agrarian crisis. Such (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)
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 (...)