The Politics of Microcredit: Global Governance and Poverty Reduction (Human Security in the Global Economy) Book

Under the system of microcredit, very small amounts of credit are given to communities in the Third World to enable them to invest in new business. The World Bank has adopted microcredit, promoting it as gender-focused development and a practical means for the emancipation of the world's poor. Heloise Weber challenges the effectiveness of microcredit and questions whether it can help achieve poverty alleviation, human security and, ultimately, human emancipation. The author defines what microcredit is and explains how it works. She traces the development of the top-down approach to microcredit, from its introduction as a policy of the Grameen Bank, through its early application among women in Bangladesh, to the MICROCREDIT Summit in Washington that established its adoption by the World Bank as a key strategy in the alleviation of global poverty. Weber exposes the true beneficiaries of the minimalist microcredit system as the private finance sector, not the world's poor. Throughout, she highlights the political implications of microcredit, which have largely been ignoredRead More