Education for Credit

Abstract

This article investigates economic aspects of citizenship in El Alto, Bolivia, through an exploration of micro-credit NGOs working with female Aymara rural-urban migrants. Such NGOs operate from a basis of transnational discourses of citizenship conceived in an individualized neoliberal framework. Their activities can be understood as a set of citizenship projects which attempt to modify the ways in which individuals act as economic agents and view themselves. In recent years, the domain of the informal economy has become one of the key fields in which differing conceptions of individuality and citizenship are worked on by local people, the state and international agencies. The micro-credit NGOs’ focus on entrepreneurial activity assumes a market-based economic rationality, and combines this with capacity-building in a ‘human development’ model. This combination reveals much about the kinds of female citizens that governments and development agencies seek to create in Bolivia: ‘empowered’ individual, entrepreneurial, active citizens, who will take responsibility for their own and their families’ welfare, and who are prepared for the market rather than the state to provide for their social rights. This article will argue that these attempts to extend Liberal citizenship through debt are undermined in two ways: first, because the women’s responses to the educational components are complex and not always accepting; and, second, because the NGOs themselves rely upon a collective, embedded economic rationality of kinship and social control to ensure the re-payment of loans.