Gender and rural microfinance: Reaching and empowering ... - IFAD

In India, many organizations are involved
in promoting women’s leadership in local
council bodies. SEWA, for example, promotes
women’s unions and organizations. Grameen
Bank and other MFIs in Bangladesh
disseminated voter education material to
women through their organization before the
last elections. In Africa, CARE-Niger has been
very effective in developing women’s
leadership to compete in local elections.
A number of microfinance programmes
have developed other innovations to put
women’s groups at the forefront of
citizenship development in rural areas. In
India, Hand in Hand, Swayam Shikshan
Prayog and ANANDI developed rural
information centres (box 15) to help women
obtain information from the Internet and as a
resource for the groups or clusters to generate
income. Illiteracy no longer needs to be a
barrier to using such facilities: software and
technology can now make much information
accessible through voice transmission, video
and other formats. Despite support from
numerous donors, however, many
information centres remain underused for
lack of community organization and training,
or they are dominated by male youth (in
some places for downloading pornography).
When managed by women’s SHGs or cluster
organizations, the centres often provide
effective services to the community.
More careful consideration should be
given to the levels and types of decisions for
which women’s participation is needed in
order to strengthen their empowerment, to
decide who should participate, and the types
of participation that can be most empowering
(see following section). It is important to be
clear about the potential costs and benefits
for women and to have a participatory
process for identifying the actual costs and
benefits and the best ways forward.
Groups and programmes do not need to
be women-only to help bring about change.
Involving men can avoid unnecessary gender
conflict and enable women to be more open
about their needs and aspirations in the
wider community. Male support can be
encouraged by developing new male role
models and men’s networks for change. There
are significant opportunities for change in
mixed programmes in which men staff work
on gender issues with men, and women
leaders bring women’s concerns before a male
organization. Some mixed programmes have
very effectively organized men alongside
women to address domestic violence and
abandonment of women. In women-only
programmes, men can be invited to some
women's meetings, provided they do not
dominate. Mixed programmes also require a
participatory process to establish internal
norms for promoting gender equality in
leadership positions.
Participation does not need to be groupbased.
Many rural finance programmes use
participatory tools for consulting clients and
members – for example, for market research,
programme design and participatory
monitoring and evaluation. Especially in
cooperatives and self-managed programmes,
there are well-established systems for
participatory decision-making. Many MFIs
originally started as NGOs that saw
themselves at the cutting edge of participatory
methodologies. Banks and the private sector
now view participation as good management
practice for responding to clients in a
competitive marketplace.
Contemporary management literature
liberally refers to ‘empowering’ staff to
enable them to contribute their knowledge
and expertise to improve products and the
organization itself. An organization that
possesses strong structures enabling
everyone to contribute ideas can become an
efficient learning organization, capable of
responding rapidly to changing market
realities. A common strategy to facilitate
such learning is participatory market
research (see section on page 34 in chapter
III on “Demand-driven product
development: market research and financial
literacy”). As the supply of rural finance
increases, flexibility and learning will be
crucial if programmes are to survive and
contribute to development.
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