Microcredit

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 woman, her choices and her actions, in a world (...)
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 could not sell their fish. Domestic workers, street (...)
“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 be kept, and microfinance debt be cancelled. (...)
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, Convener of the Movement for Land and Agricultural (...)
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 invented in the South Asian region (Bangladesh) by (...)
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 social movements (peasants’ movements, feminists, (...)
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 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 accentuated attention from the people who seek (...)
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 (...)