Disclosing the loan officer’s role in microfinance development

Abstract

The exclusion of the poor in developing countries requires radical enterprising solutions. Hence, microfinance was originally developed to intermediate through tailored double-bottom line initiatives, which would first supply more appropriate credit and, then other ‘financial services’, in an essentially participatory, ‘bottom-up’ way. This would support local, small-scale economic activity while enhancing well-being and social/gender justice. However, frontline local officers, originally recruited into microfinance institutions to help ‘empower’ the poor towards this end, have in practice been found to adopt unexpectedly different roles. Using original data from Zambia this article examines how this occurred in a frontier field situation. Here loan officers performed multiple, ambiguous and changeable roles while their home institution at first sought to decouple, and then prioritized its own immediate survival over their other founding aspirations. Where they acted more like ‘loan repayment agents’ and ‘debt collectors’ than genuinely participative ‘facilitators’ supporting the poor, further, unintended consequences resulted. Any further decoupling and retreat from committed double-bottom line working could bear heavily upon the further/future development prospects of microfinance.