Improving Microcredit Programs: Listening to Recipients

Field Work Completed!

2007-09-02T13:49:00.000+06:00

Since returning from our field site near Rangpur, Bangladesh, where we conducted the research component of our project, we have been completely swamped in working through the hundreds of hours of audio files we have collected and beginning the serious work of analysis. Our research team of ten villagers conducted over 150 interviews during the months of July and August, exceeding our expectations both in quantity and quality. The team interviewed members of their community about their experiences with microcredit. We met with them every day and downloaded the audio files off of their digital recorders onto a laptop, changed the recorders' batteries, and helped them with the challenges that emerged. Through this process, we had the opportunity to hear many stories directly after they had been told, and to see how the data collectors struggled with and really felt for their respondents. It was obvious to us that they really developed a passion for giving people the opportunity to have their stories heard. We became quite close to them, and we all had a difficult time saying goodbye.

The first step towards beginning the analysis is having all of the audio files translated and transcribed by a team of translators we have put together in Dhaka. The translations we’ve gotten back so far have been absolutely riveting. For one village, peoples’ experiences with microcredit have been incredibly complex and diverse. We were especially glad to see that people were excited to offer their opinions on how to improve microcredit programs. Knowing that their voices and stories were going to be shared with people not only outside of their village, but all over the world, and that their opinions would be valued and considered by people with the power to make helpful changes to the institutions most important in their lives, the respondents were invigorated. The transcripts show their hopes, dreams, challenges, struggles, and the strength people muster on a daily basis to survive in the midst of extreme poverty.

On our last day of our research, our team of data collectors arranged a tour for us of their village, as we had made a point not to go into the village ourselves beforehand so that our presence wouldn’t interfere with their research. We had the opportunity to see all their houses, meet their families, and to talk with many of the people they interviewed. In Bangladesh, hosting people in your home is a great honor, and hosting foreigners (seldom seen in Bangladesh, let alone in remote villages) is even more so. People were blown away to see us walking around the village, and we were honored to be welcomed so warmly into their homes. Everyone felt honored that we took an interest in their stories-- the interviewers said they had become like heroes in their village because they have shown that people’s stories actually mean something. The enthusiasm of our team of data collectors along with the rest of their community has made us even more excited about the potential for their stories and experiences to really have an impact on the way that microcredit programs are implemented.

Flooding in Bangladesh

2007-08-03T13:16:00.001+06:00

You may have heard about the severe flooding in South Asia recently which has displaced more than five million people in Bangladesh alone. Northwest Bangladesh, where we are conducting our research, is one of the hardest hit regions. The monsoons have hit much harder this year in Bangladesh, a country which is mainly a low-lying delta region. The country’s many rivers are flooding well above their banks. The flooding is causing severe shortages of food and clean drinking water and there is a growing crisis of water-borne diseases such as cholera. Many of Bangladesh’s northern states have been cut off from the capital and the rest of the country as a result of bridges collapsing and roads going under water. If the situation doesn’t improve in the next couple days, there is a risk of Rangpur, where we are currently located, also being cut off from the capital, which would severely cripple the economy here as many goods would become unavailable. We have been shocked to watch how quickly the flood waters rise, and can hardly believe the rapid rate at which this whole area continues to sink under water. On our daily commute through the rural farming communities on our way to Arampur, where we are conducting our research, we have seen first-hand the extreme effects of the situation. Fields where we saw children playing cricket at the beginning of our time here are now flooded so high that those same children are now swimming in water that rises above their heads.

As many of the country’s chief crops go under water, prices of essentials such as rice, oil, onions, flour, chilies and eggplant continue to rise. The situation is so severe that the military has set up subsidized fair-price shops all over the country in an attempt to keep basic staples affordable. On a recent visit to a Hindu temple, we saw villagers lined up to purchase vegetables from armed, uniformed soldiers, who had established a fair price shop at the temple’s entrance.

Luckily, the situation in Arampur is not as severe as many other places in Bangladesh, though clearly there have been obstacles to our research because of flooding. Many of our interviewers have reported not being able to leave their houses to conduct interviewers because of heavy rains and waist-deep waters surrounding their homes. As many residents of the village are rice farmers, they are struggling to maintain their livelihoods, as their crops become more flooded. Currently in the middle of one of the busiest times of the year for Bangladeshi farmers, the aman-rice planting season, the situation has presented a unique set of challenges to our research here, as our interviewers report that they have sometimes struggled to find people who have time for being interviewed, as many farmers can’t afford not to be in their fields during the scarce times when it isn’t raining. However, if the interviewers are able to leave their homes during the heavy rains, they often find more farmers who have been forced to stay home from the fields, giving them more time for talking to our researchers.

This experience has helped us to gain an acute awareness of some of the challenges which are continually faced by the villagers of Bangladesh. We’ve also seen the strength they muster as they deal with this sort of challenge again and again. It is the stories of this sort of strength and perseverance that we are hearing again and again from our interviewers who are out talking to these people about their lives. Despite challenges, our work has been extremely successful, and we have gathered many stories which are currently in the process of being translated so that we can begin the work of analysis.

To read more about flooding in South Asia and the situation in Bangladesh, see this story on the BBC website: South Asia floods strand millions.

Research Begins in Arampur

2007-07-23T11:08:00.002+06:00

As we write, we’re sitting in the Nijera Kori office in Pairabond, a large village adjacent to Arampur, the village in which our research will be taking place. For the last two days, we’ve been conducting a follow-up training session with the interviewers, reviewing what we went over a few weeks ago, and expanding on the concepts and specific questions of the research. Having gotten the basics nailed down at our training session in Bogra a few weeks ago, we’re taking a few days before the research begins on Monday for them to do more practice interviews and give them targeted feedback on their technique.

We’re very excited to be back in the field after a few weeks of developing the Partner Network in Dhaka. Northern Bangladesh is incredibly beautiful—the air is fresher, everything is green and lush. The past two days have been intermittently rainy, which keeps the temperature reasonable. There are very few cars around here, most people get around by rickshaw. We’ll be staying in Rangpur, the biggest town in the area, and getting down to Pairabond (about an hour by rickshaw) every day to check in with the interviewers.

This follow-up session has been fantastic. We’ve focused on hands-on experience. Where the last session found us explaining the basics of research and helping them frame their own experiences with microcredit into a broader frame of reference, this session we’ve gotten to have more fun, discussing the nitty-gritty details of interviewing and hearing even more about their thoughts on the research and what they’ve been hearing so far. Their increased self-confidence is evident, and as they are able to focus on interview strategy rather than keeping up with an influx of information their practice interviews are vastly improving.

After these two days of additional training, we’ll move into the data collection phase. Tomorrow, we’ll be sending our interviewers off to begin the first phase of interviews in Arampur, their home community. The first phase of interviews (semi-structured interviews with a set of questions we’ve laid out to cover as much ground as possible) will hopefully be completed in 3 or 4 days. Throughout the first phase, the interviewers will be identifying people they’ve talked to who had a lot of things to say and stories to tell about microcredit and who would be interesting to talk to further. Then we’ll move on to the second phase, which will give the interviewers the opportunity to go back to these people for an unstructured conversation which will further investigate and fully explore their experiences and thoughts on how to improve microcredit.

It’s so exciting to be at this stage of the project where the research is actually going to begin taking place. We’ll be sending all of the interview audio files down to Dhaka by courier service regularly to be translated and transcribed by our team of translators. We can’t wait to see the results! We hope to update frequently in the next few weeks as the research progresses, so keep checking back.

Introducing: Hasnera

2007-07-14T10:40:00.000+06:00

Anyone who buys into the stereotype of the submissive, oppressed Bangladeshi woman hasn’t met Hasnera, another one of our interviewers. She is outspoken, charismatic, enthusiastically and energetically engaged and engaging. You know that she is interested in what you have to say when she’s listening to you, and she makes you want to talk to her. She is definitively a leader. And she is as excited as we are about starting the research.

During the training we had the opportunity to listen to Hasnera talk about her experience with microcredit, which has apparently been fairly positive for her. When she decided to run for election to her village council (as you might expect, not terribly common for women in Bangladesh), she realized that she didn’t have enough money to stage a successful campaign, which can be relatively pretty capital-intensive. So she joined a microcredit group through a national NGO called ASA so that she could take out a loan of 5,000 taka (roughly $75 USD). With the help of her microcredit loan, Hasnera won the election and held a seat on the village council for two consecutive terms. The other interviewers clearly had a great deal of respect for her strong leadership in the community.

Hasnera was able to successfully repay her microcredit loan; she explained that her husband paid all of the installments (125 taka per week - just under $2 USD – for 46 weeks), as he was very happy about her political success. However, she didn’t have many good things to say about the process of obtaining a loan and the results for other women in her group. She explained that in order to apply for a loan, every woman had to submit a picture of her and her husband together, meaning that women who are divorced, widowed, or never married are not allowed to take loans. She also described an extensive series of added expenses (in addition to the interest on the loan, already around 15%) which borrowers are required to pay to the NGO in order to be eligible for the loan. These include mandatory insurance on her loan in case of default, as well as various documents and passbooks for ASA to keep track of her repayments. There is also a mandatory savings condition as well, which requires that every borrower makes a weekly deposit into a savings account run by the NGO, somewhere between 10 – 40 taka per week. The interviewers agreed that most people see this savings requirement as a sort of additional interest that they were required to pay the NGO, as opposed to a supply of money they had saved and could use at some later point – many people expected never to see their savings again.

Hasnera demonstrated her brilliant skills as an interviewer during a practice interview with another woman who was visiting the Nijera Kori training facility. Unexpectedly, she met another woman who had run for local office and funded her election through a microcredit loan (a fairly large coincidence, given the overall representation of women in Bangladeshi politics). After winning one election (for which she borrowed 20,000 taka – roughly $285 USD – which she was able to successfully repay) she ran for a second term for which, due to a much tighter race, she was compelled to take a microcredit loan of 75,000 taka (over $1,000 USD). When the results arrived, the woman was shocked to find out that she had not been elected for a second term, and found herself with a very large debt which she had no way of repaying. Unlike Hasnera, this woman’s husband could not help her repay her loans (due to a severe mental disability which she didn’t find out about until after their wedding, as it was an arranged marriage).

It is a widely held perception of microcredit that micro-loans are given only to entrepreneurs to start small businesses, thereby generating productive assets which the entrepreneur will use to make money to repay their loan. In Bangladesh, this is typically not the case, as loans are used for consumption purposes, such as food, shelter, medical expenses, and other non-productive assets. The stories of these women are interesting examples of the results of microcredit loans which are taken for expenses which will not produce an income to repay themselves.

We look forward to hearing many more stories from Hasnera as the research progresses.

Dr. Naila Kabeer and Nijera Kori's work to develop political consciousness

2007-07-11T13:19:00.001+06:00

We recently attended an event put on by Nijera Kori, an organization which we become more and more impressed with and excited about as we learn more about their work. At this event they presented the findings of three independent research groups which they had hired to do impact assessments of their work towards conscientization and mobilization of landless people. The seminar, entitled “Relevance and Impact of Conscientisation and Mobilisation as a Development Strategy in the 21st Century” addressed the impact of Nijera’s Kori’s strategy of raising the political consciousness of rural landless people as an alternative approach to development and poverty alleviation.

One of the highlights of this seminar was hearing the presentation of Dr. Naila Kabeer, a scholar whose work has been highly influential to our own understandings of microcredit, who had led one of the research teams. Similar to the other researchers, Dr. Kabeer found that Nijera Kori members were much more likely to show signs of high political conscientization, as well as other positive development indicators such as education for boys and girls and higher mobility of women. Nijera Kori members were also much more likely to own assets than non-members, which Dr. Kabeer told us indicates that this form of conscientization is also effective at reducing poverty.

The high levels of political activism found among Nijera Kori members were impressive and spoke to Nijera Kori’s success in mobilizing rural landless groups. The researchers found that 74% of Nijera Kori members had participated in some sort of political protest or movement at some point in the past two years, as opposed to only 3% of non-Nijera Kori members. Furthermore, they found that microcredit programs alone are not currently effectively mobilizing rural people: those who were active in microcredit programs and attended meetings regularly for these organizations were similarly unlikely (around 3%) to be politically active.

The primary precept underlying Nijera Kori’s work is a non-service based approach, meaning that while they do offer their members many things (skills, knowledge, information), they do not provide services which create a relationship of dependency between them and the people they serve. In this way, the organization itself is not the main focus; instead it is the landless organizations themselves and the people who constitute them.

A question that the seminar intended to address was: if Nijera Kori does not provide services, then why have so many people joined their groups? In their research, Dr. Kabeer and her colleagues found that many people are members of both Nijera Kori and microcredit organizations because they offer them very different things. These findings are interesting in light of many microcredit programs’ broad claims of empowerment potential, which very closely resemble the conscientization which is being found among Nijera Kori members.

For us, one of the most interesting aspects of hearing Dr. Kabeer discuss her assessment of Nijera Kori’s work is the fact that her approach to microcredit is very different from the approach taken by Nijera Kori. Dr. Kabeer has published many articles on microcredit which argue that while microcredit is not a panacea (nor does it automatically empower women), it has great potential for providing financial services to the poor. This analysis starkly contrasts with the position Nijera Kori has taken on microcredit (essentially, they are against it). Despite these differences, Dr. Kabeer explained that whether they agree or not about microcredit, the work that Nijera Kori is doing is absolutely essential, and microcredit participants who also participate in Nijera Kori programs will be immensely more equipped to establish successful enterprises and participate in the market because of their conscientization.

We look forward to learning more about these issues as we continue our research and our work with Nijera Kori, so that we might better understand not only what makes a successful microcredit program, but also what other programs can accompany microcredit to make it as successful as possible.

Click here to read an article about Naila Kabeer from The New Age, a local English daily newspaper.

Introducing: Shahobadin

2007-07-01T22:58:00.000+06:00

This is Shahobadin, another one of the interviewers working on the project. While he is one of the most enthusiastic of the group about the microcredit research, he is also one of the most enthusiastic singers; during the training, he could often be found leading group songs. As the oldest member of the group, he is clearly a leader and is highly respected by the others. When he’s not working with us on our microcredit project and doing work with Nijera Kori, Shahobadin is a professional rickshaw-van driver (this is the vehicle pictured below – it is used as the primary mode of transporting most kinds of cargo in Bangladesh – anything from fruits and vegetables to construction equipment to furniture on moving day).

In a practice interview Shahobadin conducted during the training, one man recounted a story in which villagers worked collectively to expel BRAC from their village after coming together to decide that they didn’t like the way the organization was operating in their village. BRAC, incidentally, is not only one of the biggest microcredit organizations in Bangladesh, but it is also the largest NGO in the entire world. The man explained to Shahobadin that BRAC had formed a lending group in his village, which twenty local men joined. The twenty of them started making weekly deposits to the organization, and after a few weeks took out microcredit loans. Fifteen of them were able to repay the loans, while five were unable. The man said that BRAC then froze up all their savings, and ceased paying them interest on their deposits. This angered the villagers, who decided to get together and expel BRAC from the village. This man said that the village’s collective opposition to BRAC continues to keep the organization out of the village.

We look forward to hearing many more stories about microcredit, both positive and negative, about people’s experiences with microcredit in the Bangladeshi village. By listening to the stories of people who receive loans, we hope to gain an understanding of how microcredit programs can be best equipped to meet people’s needs.

Introducing: Pushporani

2007-06-22T23:11:00.000+06:00

While most of the songs sung during the training session were sung collectively, some songs were sung only by individuals. One woman in particular, Pushporani (pictured left, in blue), had an absolutely captivating voice. When she sang, everyone stopped and listened. This song was one of the most beautiful songs we heard during our time in Bogra. One of the other interviewers made this recording of her singing.

You can also download this song in mp3 format here.

Bogra Training Session, June 11th-14th

2007-06-22T22:56:00.000+06:00

We just completed the first training session with the data collectors we’ll be working with on the project. The thirteen villagers from the Rangpur district with whom we’ll be working met us at Nijera Kori’s training center in Bogra for three days of data-collection training last week. Unnayan Onneshan’s Monower Mostafa led the training sessions, which he focused on consciousness-raising and interview techniques. Nijera Kori, who helped us determine an ideal site for our research, introduced us to these thirteen villagers who they have worked with through their own grassroots organizing work in the area. Upon meeting them for the first time, we were very impressed with their sense of comfort in interviewing and their enthusiasm for the research and the subject of microcredit.

We first met the villagers on the night we arrived in Bogra, at dinner. After we all introduced ourselves, they sang us what turned out to be one of many songs over the next few days. Singing is very common in Bangladesh, especially in the rural areas. The landless people who work with Nijera Kori are particularly excited about singing together, about all sorts of topics ranging from group solidarity to Bangladesh's liberation war to Hindu-Muslim unity.

Monower focused the first day of training on developing the perspectives of the villagers, helping them think critically about life in their village. Through a mixture of lecture, discussion, and hands-on activities throughout the day, he worked with them to come to a broader understanding of the changing dynamics of their village over time and the differences between microcredit institutions and different forms of credit available to people in their village. The training was still going strong at 9:00 when we realized it was time for dinner and we had to stop for the day. We apologized for keeping them so late, and they insisted that they were so excited about the work we were doing together that they could stay for two more hours without needing to stop.

On the second day of training, we unveiled the digital voice recorders that they will be using to record their interviews with their fellow villagers. After teaching them in small groups for about half an hour how to use the different buttons, the excitement became palpable. Learning to use the new technology was really exciting for them, particularly being able to hear their own voices played back to them. They immediately began practicing, conducting sample interviews and recording themselves singing into the recorders. They took turns recording each other, some singing alone, some in groups. Their love of singing collectively turned out to be a great way to engage more actively in learning about the technology that they'll be using for conducting interviews.

The last day of training, we staged mock interviews with another group of villagers who were visiting the center for a different Nijera Kori training session. It was great to get a chance to see our data collectors in action, trying out their new skills. Hearing the stories they heard from their test respondents was exciting. They emphasized their enthusiasm for talking to people like them about their stories and experiences with microcredit.

We are feeling extremely excited about the results of the training session, and the enthusiasm of the interviewers about getting the stories heard of microcredit at the grassroots level. The training was designed to give our data collectors the tools to fully explore people’s stories about microcredit from their own perspectives. We deemphasized formally-framed questions, and taught them instead to be sensitive to following the natural progression of stories and conversations, getting as much detail and as many angles as possible. In their sample interviews, we saw this training come to fruition. In early July, we’ll be heading up to Rangpur for a while for a follow-up training and the beginning of our data collection process!

We look forward to posting more stories about the individual interviewers soon.

Exciting New Partnerships

2007-06-07T16:54:00.000+06:00

Tuesday's brainstorming session was a great success. We had twelve representatives from NGOs representing a range of perspectives on microcredit, which made for a lively and thought-provoking discussion. Participants included Mahmuda Islam, General Secretary of Women for Women and a Professor of Sociology and Women's and Gender Studies at Dhaka University, Shahidur Rahman and Ali Asgar Sabri from ActionAid Bangladesh, Monirul Islam, from Oxfam, Proloy Barua, a member of BRAC's research staff, Faiza Ahad, the Chief Investment Officer of the Anukul Foundation, an offshoot of CARE-Bangladesh's microcredit program, as well as representatives of other NGOs in Dhaka engaging in policy, research, and development work.

Getting the participants' insights into our research goals and approaches was very valuable. The meeting was a chance for us to assess how our research can be of the most benefit to the Dhaka NGO and research community. The other participants seemed excited about gaining a stake in our research, and shared with us ideas about what kinds of information we could look for that would be most helpful to the work they are doing. Many participants had their own experiences with researching microcredit, and they shared with us their stories about conversations they had had with microcredit recipients, which have already helped us in the development of our own research questions. There was a general consensus that this kind of research is necessary, and will provide extremely helpful information that isn’t currently available to researchers and practitioners.

We are looking forward to engaging in more conversations soon with these partners about how this summer’s research can contribute to an ongoing dialogue over the state of microcredit and how it can be improved to meet the needs of the poor. By maximizing the involvement of the broader community in the process of conducting this research, we hope to increase the impact of the products of our research, assuring that the voices of our respondents will be heard throughout Bangladesh’s NGO community and beyond.

We also extended a formal invitation to all participants to join the Dhaka City Partner Network which is currently in development, and discussed with them our plans to hold an international conference in Dhaka in 2008 focusing on new directions in poverty alleviation, in which we enlisted their help. We will be following up this Brainstorming Session with individual meetings in the near future to have more in-depth discussions about the possibilities of partnership and expanding the scope and potential of our research.

Upcoming Brainstorming Session

2007-06-03T13:21:00.000+06:00

We're planning a major brainstorming session to discuss our research goals and questions with other organizations and researchers in the Dhaka NGO community. It will be an opportunity for us to engage the diverse insights and perspectives of the organizations involved in thinking about the issues we'll be dealing with this summer. A number of prominent NGO's have confirmed that they'll be sending representatives, including ActionAid and Oxfam.

With so many people here with different approaches to thinking about poverty alleviation, this brainstorming session will be a major step towards getting the many organizations with an interest in microcredit and empowerment around the same table to discuss the state of microcredit in Bangladesh. We will be channeling this collaborative work into building a Goldin Institute partner city network in Dhaka. The brainstorming session is scheduled to take place this Tuesday, June 5th at Unnayan Onneshan. We look forward to letting you know how it goes!

New Project Partnership with Nijera Kori

2007-06-03T12:07:00.000+06:00

We’ve got some fantastic news to share about the project. Last week we met with Khushi Kabir, the director of the Bangladeshi organization Nijera Kori, and invited them to partner with the Goldin Institute and Unnayan Onneshan on our research project this summer. We're thrilled to announce that they've accepted! Nijera Kori’s experience and resources will be a huge contribution to the project.

Nijera Kori works to organize landless groups and laborers. They have an extensive network of grassroots organizers in many communities across Bangladesh, and have an intimate knowledge of the operations of these communities. Their work has been the subject of extensive academic research projects, which have consistently determined that the work Nijera Kori is doing in Bangladesh is unparalleled in its empowerment of landless groups. With their help, we have selected our research site. The village, in the northern Rangpur district, is home to about 700 families. There are eight microcredit organizations active there, which means it will be the perfect site for our research. Nijera Kori has also identified the ten community members who we will train to do the interviewing for the project.

Nijera Kori also has a training facility in Bogra, and have agreed to allow us to use this space to conduct the three-day training for our interviewers. The training is currently scheduled for mid-June.

Introduction

2007-05-21T10:28:00.000+06:00

Arriving in Dhaka on Friday night, we were immediately struck by the sensory nature of life in urban Bangladesh. The exhaust of the traffic overburdening the city and the pungent smell of Bengali curries mix with the mustiness caused by Dhaka's summer humidity to create a smell truly unique to life in Dhaka. For us, the familiarity of this sticky smell clashed with the many recent changes to life in Bangladesh's capital city.

As we drove, our companion Jason told us all about the political situation we had missed out on over the last five months. In January 2007, rather than the scheduled elections which had been made impossible by insider corruption and constant civil unrest, there was a military takeover which The Economist calls a coup. While the government denies this claim, politics, both indoor meetings and outdoor rallies, have been explicitly banned.

The military-backed government has made an incredible amount of progress combating corruption, a major stumbling block to a free and fair democracy in a country which has been rated one of the most corrupt in the world. The new anti-corruption stance has brought a dizzying amount of reforms, involving the arrest of countless top politicians, as well as the attempted exiling of the heads of the country’s two primary political parties, both former prime ministers. The implications of these new policies to everyday life are numerous. To combat the inadequacy of the country’s overburdened electrical grid, the government has required all businesses (excepting restaurants) to close at 7pm. This has caused an unfamiliar emptiness in the streets in the late evening, which makes Dhaka feel like a much different place.

Moreover, the ban on politics makes everyday life in the city run much more smoothly, as general strikes (“hartals”) called by the two oppositional political parties which had paralyzed the city on a regular basis have ended. Before we left in late 2006, the hartals had gotten so far out of hand that life in the city was stopped for weeks at a time: protestors blockaded the capital city from the rest of the country, restricted cars and trucks from the roads, and forced businesses to stay closed.

We became quite familiar with this difficult political climate when we were in Dhaka for six months last year starting a microcredit program from the ground up, after designing an alternative microcredit model which attempted to respond directly to the needs of the recipients of microcredit and the problems which have been identified with existing programs.

While in Dhaka, we worked with a group of former garment workers to start two cooperative businesses which they designed and operated collectively. We facilitated business education classes for the women, granted them two large, interest-free loans, and set up provisions for ongoing business support.

The results of the project were both exciting and challenging. On the positive side, utilizing a cooperative model was effective at ensuring that the loans were controlled by the women themselves, a hotly contested issue in the debate over microcredit. In the cooperative, the mutual accountability tempered the husbands' power to commandeer their assets.

Perhaps the most frustrating obstacle we encountered in this project was realizing that the information we received from the women on their situation and needs was heavily influenced by what they thought we wanted to hear and expected from them. The model was designed to incorporate the recipients’ own felt needs, yet our status as relatively wealthy Western researchers inherently shaped how they related to us. The complexities of working to understand their needs were further complicated by their extensive experience with existing microcredit programs, which conditioned their ideas on how microcredit is supposed to operate, as opposed to how it might work best for them.

To alleviate this, we hired Bangladeshi field workers to interview and interact with the women, as we thought that as fellow Bangladeshis they would be able to relate to the women better than us and therefore get more accurate information, but this relationship was also problematic. Strong class hierarchies in Bangladesh involve dynamics which similarly inhibit truly communicating the perspectives of people living in poverty. Our field workers: literate, educated middle-class Bangladeshis, had much less in common with the women we worked with than we had expected, and had a correspondingly difficult time interacting with them.

We emerged from that project with few answers, a lot of questions, but many insights into the state of microcredit in Bangladesh. Our conviction that the voices of microcredit recipients are vital to the development of the vast potential of microcredit as a tool for development is stronger than ever, even as our experience has shown the difficulty of creating the space to hear those voices.

This summer, we will be using an innovative research technique, non-hierarchical oral testimony, pioneered in Bangladesh by the Dhaka development think-tank Unnayan Onneshan, our partners in this project, to create a space in which to hear these voices and incorporate them into the debate on microcredit. The end result will be both the development of improved or new grass-roots microcredit projects and a series of policy recommendations.

We're currently desperately raising money for this project, as well as other planned projects expanding on this research. If at all possible, please take a moment and make a donation using the easy, free, and secure PayPal link on the sidebar.