The hidden labor of repayment: Women, credit, and strategies of microenterprise in northern Honduras

Abstract

AbstractMicrolending programs, commonly directed at women and presented as a solution to global poverty, provide borrowers credit to support small, informal income‐generating activities. These initiatives have garnered much attention from anthropologists, who have long been interested in the social life of credit and debt. Despite numerous anthropological studies critiquing the social and economic consequences of such lending practices, they continue, bolstered by the affective dimensions of philanthropic marketing and the current embeddedness of microloans in local economies. This contradiction has led to more recent ethnographic work demonstrating the interaction of microloans with other forms of debt and credit in the social economy of borrowers. Building on this recent work, this article draws on ethnographic data from microloan borrowers in northern Honduras and the Bay Islands and contends that the activities associated with microlending participation and repayment may be understood as a form of productive, though hidden, labor. The article suggests further avenues of inquiry into the long‐term economic and cultural transformations that microlending has precipitated.