Women and Microcredit in Rural Bangladesh: An Anthropological Study of Grameen Bank Lending

As Rahman notes in his introduction, microcredit has become the paradigm for thinking about economic (p. 1). Since the limits of welfare-oriented approaches are now well recognized, an ever-growing wave of microlending initiatives are cloning Bangladesh's Bank model in efforts to alleviate poverty and empower the poor. Because of women's higher repayment rates and prioritization of expenditure on family welfare, many of these programs target women specifically, as a means for increasing project cost efficiency and for achieving more effective poverty alleviation. Rahman's study of one of the Bank's oldest village projects is part of a recent literature critiquing the global consensus that microlending to the poor is the key to economic development in the 21st century. Rahman challenges the…