Identity, Moral Economy, and Livelihoods: Women’s Use of Microfinance in Luribay, Bolivia

Abstract

There is a large and growing body of literature on ‘development with identity’ that considers the cultural impositions implicit in development interventions, emphasizes the importance of cultural identity to development, and examines possible ways of achieving this (Basu 2006, Radcliffe et al. 2003, Pieterse and Parekh 1995, Zoomers 2006).1 This chapter explores microfinance in the context of this ‘cultural turn’ in development studies. Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) offer small loans to groups of women on the basis of a group guarantee. In some ways MFIs have potential to facilitate ‘development with identity’, particularly socially minded institutions such as Credit with Rural Education (CreCER), the Bolivian MFI that will be discussed in this chapter. As with many MFIs, CreCER uses ‘social collateral’ — a group guarantee against the loan in which beneficiaries are jointly liable for the loan taken out, and trust and peer pressure within the group ensure repayment. Beneficiaries also participate in running the ‘village bank’2 and the financial services are supplemented with training programmes and group discussion. The institutions’ main development aims are to shore up small businesses and ‘capitalize’ rural female beneficiaries, while also empowering women and contributing to local social development. By foregrounding the views of women beneficiaries of CreCER in a rural Aymaran-speaking valley in Bolivia, I want to explore how these aims — common to MFIs worldwide — are culturally situated in local discourses of gender, ethnicity, and religion.