SEWA

Women’s ENews has a very informative commentary on the IMF and it’s value to women.

(WOMENSENEWS)–Earlier this month President Bush, in a speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, opined that microcredit has “been very successful.”

Bush went on to say, “If you’re a rural farmer scratching out a subsistence living, would you want to be able to sell your goods to new markets overseas?” Don’t you “want to be able to sell into a larger universe?”

Apparently Bush and others believe that rural farmers will successfully exit subsistence agriculture and start competing for market share side by side with multinational powerhouses like ConAgra, General Foods and Nestle.

This equates the activities of the world’s largest corporations with the activities of peasants–mostly women–bartering in rural fairs. Yeah, right.

One expects Bush to endorse policies popular at the World Bank. But when the Nobel Prize Committee, the United Nations and hundreds of international development agencies join the celebration of microcredit as the key to reducing female poverty via women’s economic empowerment we have an obligation to probe their underlying premises.

Powerful policy makers–at the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Federal Reserve and the White House–share the view that markets (specifically the individual exchanges that occur in markets) will save the world’s poor.

This view is an article of faith for neo-liberals since they adhere to the economic philosophy that holds that capitalism and unfettered markets will cure the world’s ills. It assumes that poverty is a problem of individual behavior.

In this article the authors contrasts the IMF approach with SEWA (SELF EMPLOYED WOMEN’S ASSOCIATION) approach. [Read more…] about “Microcredit”=What the IMF offers women