'Money can't buy me love'? Re-evaluating gender, credit and empowerment in rural Bangladesh

Lending programmes for women have attracted a growing following in international development circles because they appear to hold out the promise of combining poverty reduction objectives with the goal of empowering women.
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\nIn Bangladesh, however, the country in which many of these programmes were pioneered, there have been a recent spate of highly contradictory evaluations of the impact of credit on women's lives in rural Bangladesh, very often of the same or broadly similar programmes. While some of these evaluations reiterate the finding that loans to women help them to improve their position within their households as well as in the broader community, others claim that women not only have not benefitted, but they may have also been left worse off.
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\nThis…