Building Empowerment: Female Grameen Entrepreneurs in Rural Bangladesh

Abstract

This paper examines how the poor female borrowers of Grameen Bank microcredit in rural Bangladesh sought to fight social marginalisation through the production of domestic space. Impoverished women used meagre housing loans from Bangladesh's micro-lending bank to replace their climatically vulnerable and poverty-stricken mud huts with ‘modern’ houses made of such durable materials as tin and reinforced concrete columns. But did these enterprising women's pursuit of a strong shelter lead to a higher quality of life and social empowerment? This paper contends that an analysis of a poor entrepreneur's use of microcredit to build a durable house as a pre-condition for social well-being calls into question development economics' conventional emphasis on economic growth as the key indicator of social advancement.