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Kiva.org, Person-to-Person Lending, and the Conditions of Intercultural Contact
Abstract
Emerging groups such as Kiva International are using the Internet to make person-to-person microlending available by matching mostly First World lenders with Third World borrowers. This study analyzes 635 lender profile Web pages on Kiva.org to identify how Kiva International and its lenders imagine this intercultural, financial exchange through an analysis of discourses that lenders use in their lender profiles to describe their motivations for lending. This article first provides background on Kiva International and the role of the Internet in addressing power inequalities, and then explains the methodological approach. Next, we reveal the themes that emerged in our analysis of lender profiles, addressing the ways that neoliberal discourses of individualism and personal responsibility guide lenders’ motivations for participating in Kiva.org's microlending process. Finally, we offer discussion and implications of this deployment of neoliberal discourse for intercultural communication, new media, and global financial exchanges, arguing that seemingly liberal and progressive Internet-discourses can perpetuate problematic neoliberal notions.
... In contrast to this distinct commercial orientation, a small number of prosocial P2P lending platforms have emerged. These platforms aim to use the Internet as a catalyst for achieving the United Nations' grand sustainable development goal (SDG 1) of ending poverty (Carr, Dickinson, McKinnon, & Chávez, 2016;McKinnon, Dickinson, Carr, & Chávez, 2013). The lending platform Kiva is probably the most famous example in this context (see Berns, Figueroa-Armijos, da Motta Veiga, & Dunne, 2020;Burtch, Ghose, & Wattal, 2014;Johansen & Nielsen, 2016). ...
... The digital form is central to interactions with lenders, who mostly see the prosocial P2P lending platforms' online manifestation (Carr et al., 2016). The digital image is thus crucial to the firm's relationships on the supply side (ie, with current and prospective lenders) and it enables lenders to "connect" with borrowers (McKinnon et al., 2013). In other words, the online focus helps recruit and retain lenders and is key to the financial viability of the business. ...
... Rang De's fieldwork actionsintermediary relationship-building and borrower-relationship buildingreflect its prosocial orientation. They are also different from other prosocial P2P lending platforms, where positive social impact is assumed, with the platforms themselves staying removed from borrowers' lives and possessing little contextual awareness of the realities of rural life (cf., Mckinnon et al., 2013). Rang De invests significant time and resources in its engagement with intermediaries and borrowers. ...
Prosocial P2P lending platforms are a novel and powerful example of a digital social innovation (DSI) in which the operating model relies primarily on digital technologies and the overarching focus is on the “social” aspect of the innovation. These platforms establish a virtual connection between low‐income individuals and lenders, helping the former access loans at low rates of interest. In realising their mission of fighting poverty, prosocial P2P lending platforms maintain a challenging hybrid – online and offline – focus. This paper explores how prosocial P2P lending platforms enact their hybrid orientation. It draws on an inductive qualitative study of Rang De, India's first prosocial P2P lending platform. The analysis highlights five clusters of actions: digital attention‐building, digital credibility‐building, digital empathy‐building, intermediary relationship‐building, and borrower relationship‐building. The paper argues that significant strengths on the online side help establish a sustainable business model. A willingness and commitment to maintain a high degree of engagement with the complex offline world of low‐income borrowers helps develop the model as an impactful social innovation.
... The IT artefact, the material crowdfunding platform, plays an important, enabling role for charitable crowdfunding. For example, the manner and type of information presented on the platform play a critical role in how donors will respond (Allison et al., 2015;Desai and Kharas, 2009;McKinnon et al., 2013;Riggins and Weber, 2011). However, it is not well understood why certain information should be included or excluded; and existing studies have implicitly treated functionality of the platform beyond information as a "fixed landscape". ...
... Despite the fact that many of the above studies on crowdsourcing and crowdfunding suggest the importance of IT affordances offered through crowdfunding platforms and of campaigns for supporting donors' motivation, no study has examined the nature of this relationship to date (to our knowledge). McKinnon et al. (2013), for example, specifically call for studies that examine how the visual representation of the platform, the campaign and the campaigner impacts on donors. The study and analysis reported in the remainder of this paper respond to their call, taking advantage of the above concepts of affordance theory and motivation theory. ...
... In both charitable crowdfunding campaigns (Earthship Kapita and Medical Research), a mixture of textual and visual media was used to effectively convey the goals and objectives of the underlying projects to potential donors. Other studies have also found that the more appealing and useful the project information presented, the more meaningful it would be to donors considering a possible contribution to the project (Allison et al., 2015;Lee et al., 2013;McKinnon et al., 2013;Mollick, 2014;Riggins and Weber, 2011). In the Earthship Kapita case, for example, the video of the current community centre demonstrated to donors the potential benefits of the project. ...
Purpose
– The purpose of the paper is to better understand the relation between information technology (IT) affordances and donor motivations in charitable crowdfunding.
Design/methodology/approach
– This paper reports the findings from a comparative case study of two charitable crowdfunding campaigns.
Findings
– The affordances of crowdfunding platforms support types of donor motivation that are not supported effectively, or at all, in offline charity.
Research limitations/implications
– For future researchers, the paper provides a theoretical model of the relation between IT affordances and motivations in the context of charitable crowdfunding.
Practical/implications
– For practitioners in the charity space, the paper suggests why they may wish to consider the use of charitable crowdfunding and how they may go about its implementation.
Originality/value
– Based on field research at two charitable crowdfunding campaigns, the paper provides a new theoretical model.
... This is in spite of research suggesting that on a typical crowdfunding platform, non-profit status on individual projects derives higher success rate and overall funding amount than its for-profit counterparts (Lambert and Schweinbacher, 2010), and that online crowdfunding is increasingly used for non-commercial purposes (Choy and Schlagwein, 2015;Davies, 2014). Moreover, studies on donation-based crowdfunding campaigns have largely focused on one specific mode of peer-topeer lending for charitable purpose (Knudsen and Nielsen, 2013;McKinnon, et al., 2013), but neglected other charitable crowdfunding modes, such as those from groups and organizations soliciting donations for social and charitable causes. ...
This study investigates individual motivations to contribute to charitable crowdfunding campaigns from the collective action perspective. A three-group post-test with control experiment (personal source: close friends, family v. impersonal: organizational source v. control: no known source) accounting for individual predispositions (cause involvement, altruism, attitude toward crowdfunding, prior experience) was done. No significant effect of source personalness was found. Instead, a main effect on likelihood to donate to a charitable crowdfunding campaign depends on whether there was a source or not to begin with — with no known source being less influential than a personal and an impersonal source. Post-hoc analysis revealed a moderation effect of cause involvement to motivate greater donation likelihood when the source is perceived to be more personal. Theoretical implications for future research and practical suggestions for prosocial online crowdfunding for charitable purposes are discussed.
... Chen et al. [2013] describe a fuzzy set approach to measure the level of entrepreneurship orientation of online P2P lending platforms. McKinnon et al. [2013] analyze the Internet-based discourses through which lenders imagine the intercultural, financial exchange that happens through Kiva's microlending program. ...
P2P lending is an emerging Internet-based application where individuals can directly borrow money from each other. The past decade has witnessed the rapid development and prevalence of online P2P lending platforms, examples of which include Prosper, LendingClub, and Kiva. Meanwhile, extensive research has been done that mainly focuses on the studies of platform mechanisms and transaction data. In this article, we provide a comprehensive survey on the research about P2P lending, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first focused effort in this field. Specifically, we first provide a systematic taxonomy for P2P lending by summarizing different types of mainstream platforms and comparing their working mechanisms in detail. Then, we review and organize the recent advances on P2P lending from various perspectives (e.g., economics and sociology perspective, and data-driven perspective). Finally, we propose our opinions on the prospects of P2P lending and suggest some future research directions in this field. Meanwhile, throughout this paper, some analysis on real-world data collected from Prosper and Kiva are also conducted.
... There is a need for communication scholars to pay attention to the phenomenon of online microfinance cybercultures such as Kiva.org. First, the digital representation of borrowers in digital mediums like Kiva influences how lenders (mostly Western audiences) perceive these borrowers (McKinnon, Dickinson, Carr, & Chávez, 2013). Though Web 2.0 communicative technologies have been theorized as democratizing tools for those that have access, it is important to note that these same tools can be used to silence others. ...
This article critically examines the visuals and texts on Kiva.org, using race in cyberspace and the notion of the subaltern as theoretical frameworks (Nakamura, 2002, 2008). The imbalances of the past still exist in digital forms on the Internet. This article argues that, although organizations like Kiva seek to promote social change in low- and middle-income countries, the Web 2.0 technologies they use generate some of the same inequalities they seek to address. These inequalities question the development and social change characteristic of these digital technologies. The study concludes that, although the empowered appear to speak on sociofinancial networks like Kiva.org, paradoxically, their voices are silenced through the same Web 2.0 technologies used to empower them.
... Charitable crowdfunding intermediary platforms such as Kiva, Chuffed, Pledgie and StartSomeGood have emerged, indicating the growing use of charitable crowdfunding in practice. Currently, published research available on charitable crowdfunding campaigns has focused on one specific mode of charitable crowdfunding, peer-to-peer lending (e.g., Kiva) (Knudsen and Nielsen, 2013;Ly and Mason, 2012;McKinnon, Dickinson, Carr and Chávez, 2013), but not on the distinct (Bradford, 2012) and prominent donation-based crowdfunding model. Donations are the most common and the most typical version of charity. ...
Crowdfunding is an information technology (IT)-enabled, online model for raising funds for charity that can be used as an alternative to traditional, offline charity models (e.g., bake sales, doorknocking or society events). Over the past three years, more and more charity organizations have turned to crowdfunding in addition to, or instead of, traditional fundraising. Why is that? In this paper, we explore one case of charitable crowdfunding, the 2014 “Earthship Kapita” campaign, with particular attention to the critical role of IT. Building on the theory of IT affordances and motivation theory, we find that crowdfunding supports particular types of donor motivation (e.g., to be part of a community, to show one’s social engagement) that are not supported by traditional charity models. The analysis allows us to propose an initial model linking IT affordances and motivation in the context of charitable crowdfunding. The paper informs future research by theorizing the link between IT affordances and motivation. It informs practitioners in the charity space about why they should consider, and how they could implement, charitable crowdfunding.
... We found that human computation methods have stimulated the economy via an online workforce ecosystem [2], which includes crowdsourced labor markets [3], contributive vocational training [4], innovation crowdfunding [5], and microlending to third-world entrepreneurs [6]. Human computation also has been used to support important behavioral change (e.g., to encourage health-related behaviors) via social networks [7] [8], accelerate research [9], educate the public [10] through citizen science, enable new modes of civic engagement [11] through democratic processes, and reduce geopolitical conflict [12] through participatory gaming. ...
... We found that human computation methods have stimulated the economy via an online workforce ecosystem [2], which includes crowdsourced labor markets [3], contributive vocational training [4], innovation crowdfunding [5], and microlending to third-world entrepreneurs [6]. Human computation also has been used to support important behavioral change (e.g., to encourage health-related behaviors) via social networks [7] [8], accelerate research [9], educate the public [10] through citizen science, enable new modes of civic engagement [11] through democratic processes, and reduce geopolitical conflict [12] through participatory gaming. ...
The internet has given rise to human participation in computational systems, via social networking, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence, and other manifestations in which people contribute information processing that is central to system behaviors and outcomes. For example, the online verification service, reCAPTCHA provides a resource by which websites can determine if the inputs they are receiving come from a human or machine by asking the “user” to enter words seen in distorted text images. While reCAPTCHA may protect websites from mal-intentioned ‘bots’, it is also a resource that helps digitize the text of old books and newspapers by including failed OCR fragments among the examples of distorted text, and using human responses as the means to decode them.
eCAPTCHA is just one of a growing body of examples of how machine and human effort, when thoughtfully organized, come together to create a distributed information processing system. The success of such Human Computation (HC) systems ultimately comes from coupling understanding of Computer Science sensibilities, especially in the design and implementation of computational systems, with understandings of human proclivities, capabilities, and behavior.
This expansive, interdisciplinary research space includes machine-mediated computation by groups of individuals (e.g., pipelined problem solving systems), aggregate analytic results by groups that result from individual information processing (e.g., prediction markets), distributed networks of human sensors (e.g., mash-ups), and many other varieties of information processing that derive from involvement of humans as computational agents in simple or complex systems.
Thus, HC draws participants from such CS fields as computational linguistics, computer graphics, computer theory, computer vision, databases, geospatial systems, human-computer interaction, information retrieval, Internet technology and e-commerce, semantic web, machine learning, multi-agent systems, programming languages, robotics, sensor networks, software engineering, and wireless computing. In addition to these CS fields, a variety of outside disciplines have more recently been brought to bear on HC research, including behavioral sciences, cognitive science, complexity science, cultural anthropology, economics, evolutionary biology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Knowledge from these outside areas informs participatory mechanisms, inspires architecture and algorithm design, and helps anticipate the ramifications of systems that engender thought, interaction, and behavior at the human-computer interface.
Despite the area’s relative youth, HC systems have been embedded in real-world settings where the combined efforts of people and computing are achieving outcomes of notable scope and significance, such as in disaster relief, medical research, planetary resilience, scientific discovery, and education. A national research thrust in human computation, as characterized by this CCC study, is timely due to its potential to advance Computer Science, bring a significant new form of “computational thinking” to the behavioral sciences, and address problems of societal and national significance. We seek to bring together world-class luminaries, thought leaders, and innovators to explore the past and prospective impact of human computation and to clearly delineate the research areas and activities that will directly lead to the most beneficial national and societal outcomes.
Disintermediation is the ability to sell products and services directly to consumers without these having to pass or go through a ‘middleman’, such as travel agent or record company. With no product or service to sell to consumers, disintermediation in the non‐profit sector has been conceived as the giving of money directly to beneficiaries/end users, without the need to go through a ‘middleman’ charity—in other words, it is disintermediated giving. However, there is no consensus definition of what ‘disintermediated giving’ is or to what it applies. Much of the academic literature has focused on one form of disintermediated giving: crowdfunding, which is generally conducted on digital platforms. However, not all crowdfundraising/crowdfunding disintermediates charities from the process of giving; and not all disintermediation of charities from the giving process is accomplished via digital crowdfunding platforms. Further, there are examples of various forms of disintermediated giving, particularly, but not solely via crowdfunding platforms, that have raised questions about its practices, ethics, regulation and accountability. Finding robust and sustainable solutions to these issues first requires a coherent conceptualisation of disintermediation/disintermediated giving in the non‐profit sector. This paper attempts to do that by providing a typology of disintermediation/disintermediated giving. We examine the phenomenon of disintermediation in organisations that adopt the ‘traditional charity model’ (those which ask for and then convert donations into goods and services for beneficiaries) and look to see which functions and processes are subjected to disintermediation. This can be either the whole or part of that asking/converting process, which is replaced or bypassed by a different entity (individuals, commercial fundraising entities, or companies or charities that adopt an alternative approach to the ‘traditional charity model’). Our typology contains three main types of disintermediation: (A) the charity is disintermediated, with donations and support given directly by donors to beneficiaries; (B) the charity's fundraising function is disintermediated; (C) the charity's service provision to beneficiaries is disintermediated. Each of these raises ethical and regulatory issues, which we briefly explore.
P2P lending is an increasingly prosperous financial market, where lenders can directly bid and invest on the loans posted by borrowers. However, when facing massive loan requests, it is very difficult and also boring for lenders to choose loan portfolios meeting their ideal expectations. Actually, when choosing loans, most lenders pursue the highest profit with the lowest risk as well as satisfying their hobbies. In this paper, we formalize a multi-objective optimization problem to help lenders select loan portfolios. Specifically, the recommending scenario in P2P lending is formulated as a multi-objective optimization problem, where two objective functions are designed for capturing lenders' multiple demands. On this basis, a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on return-risk management named MOEA-RRM is then proposed for the multi-objective optimization problem, which can help lenders choose loan portfolios to meet lenders' multiple demands. Furthermore, in MOEA-RRM, a decision space dimensionality reduction strategy and an initialization strategy are proposed to improve the performance of algorithm. Finally, experimental results on a real-world P2P lending data set demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed MOEA-RRM, i.e., the proposed approach can recommend the loan portfolio with a good trade-off between risk and return as well as satisfying the hobbies of lenders.
This paper studies Kiva, the world’s largest online, peer-to-peer social lending marketplace. We consider two stages in the development of the Kiva marketplace: a growth stage when Kiva was focused on quantity, and a maturity stage when Kiva shifted to emphasize quality (broadly defined). Our starting point is the common hypothesis that marketplace success is driven by network effects which facilitate growth – a quantity focus. We argue, however, that as a marketplace becomes mainstream, it focus shifts to improving quality – creating additional sources of value for users by adding capabilities and improving the user experience. We test this proposition using data from Kiva. Our proposition is supported: while network effects are strong and significant during the early growth phase of the marketplace, they become weak or disappear as the marketplace becomes mainstream. We study the implications of our findings for the deployment, implementation and management of online marketplaces.
In the wake of successive crises, novel politics and ethics are emerging around attempts to institute a ‘new’ world of finance in the name of social relations. Financial start-ups and development organizations, often working alongside established financial institutions, are experimenting with the ‘social’ in order to create markets and scale up their activities. At the same time, people continue to advance social claims in finance out of concern for others. This article examines the rise, politics and ethics of this experimentation in what we call ‘relational finance’. Our argument is that by rendering the social dimensions of finance explicit, contemporary relational finance makes sociality available for marketization and politicization. We illustrate this claim with three examples of mobilizations of the social in everyday lending and borrowing: social collateral, social lending and social debt. Relational finance, we conclude, is far from an unproblematic ‘alternative’ but retains ethical and political potential.
Online social lending has facilitated borrowers to reach lenders for financing supports. With the increasing number of social lending projects, it is becoming very difficult for lenders to find appropriate projects to invest, and for borrowers to get enough funds. The project recommendation techniques provide a promising way to solve this issue to some degree, by recommending the borrowers’ projects to the lenders who may invest. Unfortunately, the current loan project recommendations only explore some structured information to match the borrowers and lenders, so they cannot achieve satisfied performances to solve the problem very well. In this study, we innovatively mine a huge amount of unstructured data, the text data of borrowers’ and lenders’ motivations, for the loan project recommendations to solve the mismatching problem between borrowers and lenders. We present a motivation-based recommendation approach, and use the text mining and classifiers techniques to identify the borrowers’ and lenders’ motivations. Using the dataset from well-known social lending platform Kiva, our experiment results show that, compared with prior works, the proposed approach has improved the project recommendations in inactive lender groups and unpopular loan groups, which shows the superiority of the proposed approach to address the data sparsity and cold start problems in loan project recommendations. This study initiates an attempt to solve the information overloading problem and improve the matching between borrowers and lenders through mining the big unstructured text data in large amount of P2P platforms.
The housing and economic crises of the late 2000s present scholars with a critical moment to interrogate the stories and subjectivities used to explain people's standing in a neoliberal system. Examining the case study of Ted Williams, a panhandler who gained fame on the internet and in traditional media as “The Man with the Golden Voice” in 2011, this article investigates how dominant narratives about upward mobility and neoliberal subjectivities may shift when economic crisis threatens to expose their weaknesses. It illustrates how neoliberal ideologies mobilize particular subjects as tokens—at the intersections of race, class, and gender—to reaffirm faith in the market and its cultures. It argues that we may productively view tokenization as inherently intercultural, a process of cultural (mis)recognition that facilitates the reification of dominant ideologies.
Making global rules: Globalization or neoliberalization? Globalization and neoliberalism are both perplexingly ubiquitous phenomena. The orthodox understanding of globalization is based on a notion of increasingly borderless market extension, an apparently all-encompassing ‘condition’ in which market rules and competitive logics predominate, while the political leverage of nation-states recedes into insignificance. Meanwhile, the political project of neoliberalism represents a parallel attempt not only to visualize a free-market utopia, but to realize these self-same conditions, as the downsizing of nation-states enlarges the space for private accumulation, individual liberties and market forces. Perhaps not surprisingly, globalization and neoliberalism are often elided and entangled. Advocates of both tend to emphasize the need for corporations, governments and social actors to adjust to the new ‘realities’ of global competition; both envisage the role of markets in terms of apolitical, largely benign and integrating forces; both portray governmental bureaucracies and social collectivities as impediments to economic Globalization ...
This article presents the Internet Connectedness Index (ICI), a measure for monitoring long-term inequalities in the quality of Internet connections among users, especially in terms of whether Internet connections will enhance the chances of people's upward mobility. This index is preferable to more established digital divide measures (e.g., gadgetry ownership or time online) for research on how the Internet is being incorporated into a world of structural inequalities. The ICI utilizes conventional time, history, and context measures, but goes beyond them to capture the scope and centrality of Internet incorporation into the everyday lives of diverse social groups. The validity and robustness of ICI vis-á-vis conventional ownership and time online measures are demonstrated in this article. In addition, the authors discuss theoretical, methodological, and policy implications based on the results. The analytical data are drawn from the Communication Technology and Community Program's Metamorphosis Project, an inquiry into the communication infrastructures of seven ethnically marked residential areas in Los Angeles.
In Gambia, women groups are the core of developmental activities. The role of women in micro financing for poverty alleviation has long been recognized as vital approach to household welfare. Micro- finance generally refers to the provision of financial services (e.g. savings, credit, insurance) to the poor especially women who normally do not have easy access to formal financial institutions. In Gambia, donor agencies and NGOs are promoting micro-finance through women's groups. When linked to other interventions such as training in technical and simple business skills, microfinance can be instrumental in establishin g successful enterprises development. In the case of on farm activities were women are engaged, may require securing rights and access to productive assets. Access to credit has often proven to be the first step out of poverty alleviation because it gives rural community window of opportunity to operate small enterprise at profit orientation. Therefore, the objective of this study is to establish the need to empower and support women's group in poverty alleviation through micro-finance approach by implementing policies and strategies in rural Gambia.
This paper seeks to examine the perceptions and experiences of Nigerian Esan women who participated in Better Life for Women Program, a poverty alleviation program. Between January and June 1994, we conducted in-depth interviews with twenty members of two micro credit groups based in Ekpoma and Ubiaja. The data showed that the distance between their place of residence and the financial institutions, spouses' control over their income, the use of force and threat of prosecution by the government and financial institutions hindered regular loan repayments. The findings are indications that culture practices and expectations negatively impact on poverty alleviation programs.
The Grameen (“rural”) Bank organizes grassroots micro‐enterprises for productive self‐employment and social change among the poorest of the poor in Bangladesh. It provides collateral‐free loans and various social services for the poor, but maintains a 99 percent loan recovery rate. Many of the bank's more than two million members, 94 percent of whom are women, attribute their present well‐being to its ameliorative qualities. Using the theory of concertive control, we gained insight into why members and workers identify so strongly with the Grameen, how participation within this organization offers opportunities for empowerment, and how control systems operative within the bank account for its success. This theory also enabled us to examine how member and worker identification with the Grameen influences their evaluation of the disciplinary techniques that are part of the system. By examining the Grameen's organizational processes in terms of the theory of concertive control, we identify some of the paradoxes associated with democratic practices in organizations, and we draw insights about theory and praxis in organizing for social change.
This article seeks to provide a preliminary framework for advancing intercultural dialog, from the point of view of political science, social psychology, and anthropology as it relates to computer-mediated communication (CMC) and face-to-face (FTF) contact. It offers a basis for integrating elements which hithertofore have not been integrated as part of a strategy for intercultural dialog. In an age of intercivilizational conflict it is a vital challenge to facilitate a sustained dialog and relationship building between cultures both in FTF contexts (encounters) and via CMC for both political dialog and business activity. Combined with general theoretical elements, focus is placed upon the Middle East and includes references to several case studies. Given the need as well to engage larger segments of the world in communication and dialog such as the Islamic periphery references have also been made to South Asia. This article: (1) begins with a discussion of the vital importance of culture in international and intergroup relations; (2) relates to the importance of political context; (3) reviews main social psychological approaches for fostering positive perceptions between groups in conflict; and (4) refers to a case study of Israeli-Palestinian FTF intercultural dialog and finally relate to theory and practice of intercultural CMC in the Middle East. As an added element this article also relates to relevant communication styles in portions of the Islamic world in the Far East which has relevance to discourse in the Middle East.
This study investigates the development of relational intimacy in computer-mediated communication (CMC) by comparing it to face-to-face (FTF) interaction in a laboratory experiment. It also examines the influence of task type, gender, and group composition. Using a mixed-model factorial design, zero-history participants (n = .48) were grouped into dyads and asked to cooperate on low- and high-equivocality tasks over a series of three meetings conducted on three consecutive days. Results indicate that relational intimacy increased over time, but a significant interaction with medium and subsequent analyses reveal that this was only true for the CMC condition. Task type also interacted with time, but it did not have a significant effect on relational intimacy, nor did it interact with medium. Similarly, there was no main effect for either participant gender or group composition, nor did these factors interact with medium. The findings provide some support for the hyperpersonal communication model (Walther, 1996), which predicts that, under certain circumstances, interpersonal relationships can develop in CMC to a greater extent than they can in FTF interactions.
This article examines the role that regulated Micro Finance Organizations (MFO) have played in the Bolivian financial sector development. Using occasional references, the paper also acknowledges the contribution of non-regulated MFO in improving welfare of poor population sectors. Among policy lessons, the results suggest that microfinance is important in developing financial deepening in similar countries, such as those in the region.// El artículo examina el papel que el sector de las organizaciones de microfinanzas reguladas -conforme al marco prudencial- ha desempeñado en el desarrollo del sistema financiero boliviano. Con referencias ocasionales, reconoce las contribuciones de las microfinanzas no reguladas en propiciar aumentos del bienestar de hogares en estratos pobres de la población. Si bien Bolivia es un caso especialmente exitoso, las lecciones registradas apuntan a las contribuciones potenciales de las microfinanzas a la profundización financiera en países semejantes.
Discourses of entrepreneurship and research on women entrepreneurs have proliferated in the last two decades. This study argues that a particular conception of an entrepreneurial self underlies much literature on women entrepreneurs and their empowerment, and identifies several key assumptions of this entrepreneurial self. The study then assesses the motivations and experiences of several white women entrepreneurs in a northwestern state in the United States, finding that aspects of the entrepreneurial self are most evident in the reasons that women provide about why they became entrepreneurs. However, the experiences the women narrate reveal a more constraints-centered discourse, which features a particular interpretation of the frontier myth of the American West, and bears traces of an emergent, collective notion of empowerment. The authors explain such empowerment from critical and feminist perspectives, offering the concept of bounded empowerment as a lens through which to examine entrepreneurship and gender, and discussing its practical implications.
There has been growing interest in the application of institutionalist perspectives in the health economics literature. This paper investigates the institutionalist notion of social value and its use in economic evaluation with particular reference to a program to address HIV/AIDS and gender violence in Southern Africa (IMAGE). Institutions are the rules that govern the conduct between individuals, groups and organisations. Their social value stems from their capacity to reduce the uncertainty in human interactions thereby both reducing transaction costs and, importantly, enabling the initiation and sustainability of various activities (instrumental value). Furthermore, institutions tend to be formed around certain ethical positions and as a consequence, act in binding future decision making to these positions (intrinsic value). Incorporating such notions of social value within a conventional welfare-based measure of benefit is problematic as institutional development is not necessarily consistent with individual utility. An institutionalist approach allows for these additional domains to be factored into economic evaluation.
This study examines associations between female participation in a microcredit program in India, known as self help groups (SHGs), and women's health in the south Indian state of Kerala. Because SHGs do not have a formal health program, this provides a unique opportunity to assess whether SHG participation influences women's health via the social determinants of health.
This cross-sectional study used special survey data collected in 2003 from one Panchayat (territorial decentralized unit). Information was collected on women's characteristics, health determinants (exclusion to health care, exposure to health risks, decision-making agency), and health achievements (self assessed health, markers of mental health). The study sample included 928 non elderly poor women.
The primary finding is that compared to non-participants living in a household without a SHG member, the odds of facing exclusion is significantly lower among early joiners, women who were members for more than 2 years (OR = 0.58, CI = 0.41-0.80), late joiners, members for 2 years and less (OR = 0.60, CI = 0.39-0.94), and non-participants who live in a household with a SHG member (OR = 0.53, CI = 0.32-0.90). We also found that after controlling for key women's characteristics, early joiners of a SHG are less likely to report emotional stress and poor life satisfaction compared to non-members (OR = 0.52, CI = 0.30-0.93; OR = 0.32, CI = 0.14-0.71). No associations were found between SHG participation and self assessed health or exposure to health risks. The relationship between SHG participation and decision-making agency is unclear.
Microcredit is not a panacea, but could help to improve the health of poor women by addressing certain issues relevant to the context. In Kerala, SHG participation can help protect poor women against exclusion to health care and possibly aid in promoting their mental health.
In March 2006, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) convened a consultation meeting to explore microenterprise as a potential human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) prevention intervention. The impulse to link microenterprise with HIV/AIDS prevention was driven by the fact that poverty is a significant factor contributing to the risk for infection. Because increasingly high rates of HIV infection are occurring among women, particularly among poor African American women in the southern United States, we focused the consultation on microenterprise as an intervention among that population.
In the international arena, income generated by microenterprise has contributed to improving family and community health outcomes. This article summarizes the contributions made to the consultation by participants from the diverse fields of microenterprise, microfinance, women's studies, and public health. The article ends with recommendations for HIV/AIDS prevention and, by implication, addressing other public health challenges, through the development of multifaceted intervention approaches.
The impact of masculinity on poverty alleviation is strikingly absent in the vast literature on microcredit, the cornerstone of gender empowerment programs worldwide. A binary framework, which excludes male relatives of microcredit loanees, prevails in the Grameen Bank paradigm; it exacerbates domestic violence and prevents joint decision-making on the loan. As part of a larger feminist theoretical project that deconstructs “universal man,” this article illustrates how a nuanced picture of low-income men and masculinities is useful to practitioners. The author lived with sharecropper families in rural Bangladesh in 2001 to conduct the research on a subset of 73 men and women, drawn from a larger sample of 200 villagers. She contrasts four vignettes of “high-minded,” “abusive,” “mixed,” and habla (lacking in common sense) husbands of Grameen Bank loanees along four categories: notions of an ideal wife, domestic violence, loan decisions, and fatherhood. She argues that as the first step of a poverty alleviation strategy that uses men to change men, high-minded men and masculinity also need to be rewarded even as abusive men and masculinity need to be transformed. The article concludes with recommendations for the Grameen Bank, which analyze ways in which high-minded men can be identified, supported, and rewarded so that they can act as social change agents to prevent domestic violence, within the household and in the community.
Digital technology is changing our politics. The World Wide Web is already a powerful influence on the public's access to government documents, the tactics and content of political campaigns, the behavior of voters, the efforts of activists to circulate their messages, and the ways in which topics enter the public discourse. The essays collected here capture the richness of current discourse about democracy and cyberspace. Some contributors offer front-line perspectives on the impact of emerging technologies on politics, journalism, and civic experience. What happens, for example, when we increase access to information or expand the arena of free speech? Other contributors place our shifting understanding of citizenship in historical context, suggesting that notions of cyber-democracy and online community must grow out of older models of civic life. Still others consider the global flow of information and test our American conceptions of cyber-democracy against developments in other parts of the world. How, for example, do new media operate in Castro's Cuba, in post-apartheid South Africa, and in the context of multicultural debates on the Pacific Rim? For some contributors, the new technologies endanger our political culture; for others, they promise civic renewal.
Microcredit loans have transformed the lives of impoverished people in many countries by allowing them to start businesses. But increasingly microcredit banks are realizing that providing some kind of health coverage in tandem with the loans is essential if they want to fulfil their mission to improve lives.
The Deepening Divide: Inequality in the Information Society explains why the digital divide is still widening and, in advanced high-tech societies, deepening. Taken from an international perspective, the book offers full coverage of the literature and research and a theoretical framework from which to analyze and approach the issue. Where most books on the digital divide only describe and analyze the issue, Jan van Dijk presents 26 policy perspectives and instruments designed to close the divide itself.
Inspired by the political interventions of feminist women of color and Foucauldian social theory, Anna Marie Smith explores the scope and structure of the child support enforcement, family cap, marriage promotion, and abstinence education measures that are embedded within contemporary United States welfare policy. Presenting original legal research and drawing from historical sources, social theory, and normative frameworks, the author argues that these measures violate the rights of poor mothers. Drawing on several historical precedents the author shows that welfare policy has consistently constructed the sexual conduct of the racialized poor mother as one of its primary disciplinary targets. The book concludes with a vigorous and detailed critique of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's support for welfare reform law and an outline of a progressive feminist approach to poverty policy. © Anna Marie Smith 2007 and
Since the 1990s, microfinance has become the leading development strategy adopted by NGOs and government agencies for supporting microenterprise projects that can alleviate poverty and empower participants, especially women. Views differ, however, on whether microfinance addresses the symptoms or the social causes of poverty. This paper engages these debates by analyzing the microfinance program established by the Center for Women's Enterprise Development (CWED) in Laguna province, southern Luzon, Philippines. I argue that increased access to credit, the current focus of CVED's program, does not transform the social and economic infrastructure within which women work and live and thus falls short of institutional claims to empower beneficiaries and improve their quality of life. I suggest that the extent to which microfinance develops transformatory initiatives to meet women's real needs depends on how programs enfold social change objectives beyond credit and enable political advocacy for individual and collective action.
Neoliberalism is commonly viewed as an economic doctrine that seeks to limit the scope of government. Some consider it a form of predatory capitalism with adverse effects on the Global South. In this groundbreaking work, Aihwa Ong offers an alternative view of neoliberalism as an extraordinarily malleable technology of governing that is taken up in different ways by different regimes, be they authoritarian, democratic, or communist. Ong shows how East and Southeast Asian states are making exceptions to their usual practices of governing in order to position themselves to compete in the global economy. As she demonstrates, a variety of neoliberal strategies of governing are re-engineering political spaces and populations. Ong’s ethnographic case studies illuminate experiments and developments such as China’s creation of special market zones within its socialist economy; pro-capitalist Islam and women’s rights in Malaysia; Singapore’s repositioning as a hub of scientific expertise; and flexible labor and knowledge regimes that span the Pacific.Ong traces how these and other neoliberal exceptions to business as usual are reconfiguring relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality. She argues that an interactive mode of citizenship is emerging, one that organizes people—and distributes rights and benefits to them—according to their marketable skills rather than according to their membership within nation-states. Those whose knowledge and skills are not assigned significant market value—such as migrant women working as domestic maids in many Asian cities—are denied citizenship. Nevertheless, Ong suggests that as the seam between sovereignty and citizenship is pried apart, a new space is emerging for NGOs to advocate for the human rights of those excluded by neoliberal measures of human worthiness.
Two concerns have received significant attention in critical writing about work and learning in late modernity: the subjugation of workers’ learning to the self-interest of capitalist corporations; and the cultural hegemony of the ‘ enterprise ethos’ . In an era when so-called knowledge capital is presumed key to corporate competitiveness, worker learning becomes an oft-contested site for developing this capital. Workers’ subjectivity, their ongoing formation of identity, is a particularly desirable area for corporate control. As Usher and Solomon (1999) point out, workers’ experience is treated as ‘ manageable and in need of management’ ‐ involving struggles over how the meaning and significance of experience is interpreted, and by whom. Forrester (1999) argues that work-related learning is enmeshed in workers’ struggles for subjectivity, as they resist or consent to corporate attempts to capture their commitments, aspirations, emotional engagements and formation of selves. Meanwhile in late economic modernity, as du Gay (1996) has shown, workers are expected to be active, selfresponsible, self-reflective constructors of their own work capacities, biographies and success. In this project of ‘ the enterprising self’ , individuals are expected to construct and self-regulate their own human capital in all spheres of life, subordinating their desires for development, meaning, fulfilment, relationships, even spirituality to their work activity and work capacity. Thus empowered, individuals are supposed to innovate and adapt continuously, take risks, and assume autonomous responsibility for the self and livelihood they design through their own choices. Garrick and Usher (2000) show how worker subjectivities are being shaped by current post-Fordist workplace structures and practices to become these ‘ active learners and self-regulating subjects’ , through a governmentality that ‘ works through infiltrating regulation into the very interior of the experience of subjects’ . While important, these arguments focus on the worker as employee. This article presents a different context in which to examine workers’ learning and struggles for subjectivity in the ethos of enterprise. There has been a surge, in Canada at least, of workers leaving organisational employment to start their own businesses. In particular, women’ s business start-ups have doubled the rate of men’ s in the past decade, and often outlast men’ s businesses (Business Development Bank, 1999; Industry Canada,
Introduction PART ONE The Subjects of Production The Production of Subjects Governing Organizational Life The Cult[ure] of the Customer PART TWO Retailing and the De-Differentiation of Economy and Culture Re-Imagining Organizational Identities Consuming Organization Setting Limits to Enterprise Appendix: Research Details
This article considers the emergence of makeover reality TV, including Extreme Makeover: Home Edition (EMHE), within the cultural and political economic context of neoliberalism, which advocates corporate benevolence, individual volunteerism, and personal responsibility as principle means for solving serious social issues. Four contexts include (a) the integration of corporate philanthropy and product marketing since the 1980s; (b) the proliferation of goodwill reality TV in a post-9/11 reality television economy; (c) home improvement reality TV's connections to the housing boom, shifting domestic gender roles, and the neoliberal ideals of an “ownership society”; and (d) EMHE's representational engagement with neoliberal frameworks for addressing social inequalities with particular attention to race and the Katrina disaster. The article concludes with thoughts on how noncommercial reality TV might broaden the frameworks for addressing social problems beyond commercial TV's neoliberalism.
Ending her book with the proclamation that “the welfare mothers’ movement may . . . represent the future of American feminism,” Anna Marie Smith provides hope in the midst of a socio-political climate that demonstrates nothing less than disdain for women on welfare (259). Growing her analysis from a thoughtful entanglement of Hardt and Negri, Piven and Cloward, and Foucault, Smith provides a theoretically dense and personally well-informed exploration of welfare policies under the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRA). “[F]or it is only by studying the precise design that we can pierce the legitimating ideology of the neoliberals and religious right and grasp the emerging structure of the postwelfare State” (147).
Critiquing especially “paternafare” policies associated with the Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) program, Smith demonstrates painstakingly how “the federal government is steadily enhancing its social control apparatus” (85). Paternafare, Smith’s term for mandatory paternity identification and support regulations, functions to strip poor women of their dignity and privacy, whilst exposing them to violence at the hands of former partners. Working carefully at intersections of identity, Smith demonstrates effectively the racist and heterosexist underpinnings of contemporary welfare reform. Smith argues poignantly that such policies embody a neoliberal attitude that portrays “poverty as the fruit of personal factors alone: irrational decisions and insufficient effort” (69). She condemns further that such ideological regulations are “neo-eugenic:” TANF policies function to discourage poor women from reproducing.
Where this book is at its best is in Smith’s detailed and well-supported analysis of reform policies as they affect embodied communities. Where this book overreaches is in the introductory chapters where Smith weaves in theoretical debates of Empire, Malthusian reform efforts, and biopower. Undoubtedly, she interprets the stakes of these debates with great precision; however, the mileage garnered from these discussions is dwarfed by the richness of her later accounts of poverty. Pinpointing specific codes of TANF policies, legislative histories, and individual state welfare laws, Smith provides exceptional acuity vis-à-vis policy and protocol. The theoretical discussion, though interesting, confuses rather than clarifies her meticulous policy critiques.
Throughout, Smith illustrates striking differences between the lives of America’s poor and nonpoor with regard to privacy and social rights. In the end, Smith’s corrective is a utopian ideal that centers poor women at the normative starting point from which alternatives emerge. Demanding “radical progressive mobilization from below,” Smith offers an expansive vision for welfare reform channeled through feminist petitions for redistribution (248). Abolishing punitive paternafare policies, providing wages to women who choose child rearing as their primary work, and ensuring reproductive health benefits for all women are just a few of the shifts that would animate Smith’s just society.
In all, this book provides an important contribution to a growing body of scholarship regarding the perils of U.S. welfare reform. Despite my reservations about Smith’s theoretical bases, her book is precise, profound, and proactive. This book should be a welcome addition to the shelves of Americanists with interests in the politics of poverty, gender, and race.
The impact of masculinity on poverty alleviation is strikingly absent in the vast literature on microcredit, the cornerstone of gender empowerment programs worldwide. A binary framework, which excludes male relatives of microcredit loanees, prevails in the Grameen Bank paradigm; it exacerbates domestic violence and prevents joint decision-making on the loan. As part of a larger feminist theoretical project that deconstructs “universal man,†this article illustrates how a nuanced picture of low-income men and masculinities is useful to practitioners. The author lived with sharecropper families in rural Bangladesh in 2001 to conduct the research on a subset of 73 men and women, drawn from a larger sample of 200 villagers. She contrasts four vignettes of “high-minded,†“abusive,†“mixed,†and habla (lacking in common sense) husbands of Grameen Bank loanees along four categories: notions of an ideal wife, domestic violence, loan decisions, and fatherhood. She argues that as the first step of a poverty alleviation strategy that uses men to change men, high-minded men and masculinity also need to be rewarded even as abusive men and masculinity need to be transformed. The article concludes with recommendations for the Grameen Bank, which analyze ways in which high-minded men can be identified, supported, and rewarded so that they can act as social change agents to prevent domestic violence, within the household and in the community.
The devolution of state authority is frequently cited as a central component of neoliberalism. Such devolution reduces the state's obligations for the welfare of its subject populations. “Community” is often invoked as a potential recipient of heightened obligations, in part because of widespread and warm associations with the term. Although much academic work tracks the logic of neoliberal projects, little interrogates the assessment of devolution by the citizens upon whom it presses obligations. I undertake this task here, drawing upon extensive qualitative data gathered from a set of diverse and contiguous neighborhoods in Seattle as part of a project examining one such exercise in devolved authority, community policing. Interviews of residents in these neighborhoods demonstrate that community is not a sturdy support for neoliberalism but rather is best analogized as a trapdoor. Residents do not envision a robust political role for community and outline a range of obstacles to localized self-governance. Further, they question the extent of the state's off-loading of responsibilities. The legitimacy of the state, the data suggest, risks rupture through the trapdoor of community.
Most studies of microcredit programs for women have been concerned with the relationship between borrowers and men outside microcredit groups, such as husbands and moneylenders. In this article, I focus on the relationships forged between women within microcredit groups in a small village in Rajasthan, India. I argue that, rather than representing a new paradigm for women's empowerment, microcredit has become one of several possible platforms from which rural Rajasthani women articulate their concerns about caste, poverty, and the burden of raising daughters. Thus, microcredit is not a foreign economic form that is subsequently culturally inflected, nor does it represent the instrumentalization of culture; rather, microcredit, like other local frameworks such as evil eye, feminist organizing, and personal history, produces cultural possibility. [microcredit, Rajasthan, women's empowerment, capitalocentrism, caste relations]
This paper moves beyond a conventional critique of gay stereotyping on Bravo's popular makeover show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to consider how the show puts gay cultural expertise to work to reform a heterosexual masculinity that is compatible with the neoliberal moment. At issue are the newly public acknowledgement of gay taste and consumer expertise; the "crisis of masculinity that requires that heterosexual men must now attend to their relationships, image, and domestic habitus; and the remaking of the straight guy as not only an improved romantic partner - the metrosexual - but a more flexible, employable worker. The author concludes by considering how camp deconstructs some of Queer Eye's most heteronormative aims, even while leaving its class and consumption rationales intact.
Despite the vast literature on the economic and social affects of micro-financing in poor countries, little attention has been given to its political implications. At a time when the broader development implications of micro-financing are being recognized—thanks, in part, to the Nobel Prize Award to Prof. Yunus and the Grameen Bank—political scientists have an opportunity to contribute to and learn from the study of this financial instrument. This paper traces the existing microcredit—and more broadly the microfinance—literature to delineate the ways in which microcredit can contribute to the political awareness and activism of the poor, i.e., their political empowerment. I argue that the link between microcredit and political empowerment is self-efficacy and social capital, which can be generated from a particular form of microcredit lending where clients apply for loans as a group and share responsibility for repayment. Furthermore, I make the case for why the Central Asia and Caucasus region would provide an appropriate case to analyze the political effects of microfinance. Research in this area will not only fill an obvious gap in the literature, but it will also help microfinance institutions, donor communities and governments to better understand the wider political implications of microfinance and the ways by which to measure them.
Early research on online self-presentation mostly focused on identity constructions in anonymous online environments. Such studies found that individuals tended to engage in role-play games and anti-normative behaviors in the online world. More recent studies have examined identity performance in less anonymous online settings such as Internet dating sites and reported different findings. The present study investigates identity construction on Facebook, a newly emerged nonymous online environment. Based on content analysis of 63 Facebook accounts, we find that the identities produced in this nonymous environment differ from those constructed in the anonymous online environments previously reported. Facebook users predominantly claim their identities implicitly rather than explicitly; they “show rather than tell” and stress group and consumer identities over personally narrated ones. The characteristics of such identities are described and the implications of this finding are discussed.
Stigmatization and discrimination against people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA), and their families, remains a barrier to participation in prevention and care programmes. This barrier takes on added significance as Thailand expands provision of free antiretroviral therapy (ART). This paper documents an innovative approach to improve quality of life for PLHA, while reducing levels of stigma and discrimination. The Population and Community Development Association (PDA) began implementing the Positive Partnership Project (PPP) in 2002. In this project, an HIV-negative person must team up with an HIV-positive person to become eligible for a loan for income-generating activities. The use of microcredit to explicitly reduce stigma and discrimination is a unique feature of the PPP. While the microcredit component of the project is an important dimension for improving the status of participating PLHA, the impacts of the project extend far beyond the PLHA who receive loans. Both directly and indirectly, it has contributed to improved quality of life and economic conditions for PLHA, while raising their visibility and acceptance in hundreds of communities throughout urban and rural Thailand. This paper identifies key features of the project and considerations for adapting its use in other settings.
Summary Channels for the influence of microfinance programs on a rural household's demand for schooling are identified: income growth, risk management, child-labor demand, gender empowerment, and parent information. Within a random-utility framework, a model of household consumption, investment in education, and borrowing suggests determinants at the individual, household and regional levels of the probability of schooling gaps. Using data from two surveys of households of clients of microfinance organizations in Bolivia, regression models examine determinants of schooling gaps. Inferences about otherwise positive microfinance impacts identify potential negative effects of increased child-labor demand, which challenge usual assumptions and pose dilemmas for policymakers.
Microcredit loans have transformed the lives of impoverished people in many countries by allowing them to start businesses. But increasingly microcredit banks are realizing that providing some kind of health coverage in tandem with the loans is essential if they want to fulfil their mission to improve lives.
As suggested above, an active debate has long been underway - and has intensified in the wake of the Asian crisis - about the appropriate scope and intrusiveness of IMF policy conditionality. In this paper, I take up one key element of that debate, namely, the role of structural policies in IMF-supported adjustment programs. By "structural policies," I mean policies aimed not at the management of aggregate demand but rather at either improving the efficiency of resource use and/or increasing the economy's productive capacity. Structural policies are usually aimed at reducing/dismantling government - imposed distortions or putting in place various institutional features of a modern market economy. Such structural policies include, inter alia: financial-sector policies; liberalization of trade, capital markets, and of the exchange rate system; privatization and public enterprise policies; tax and expenditure policies (apart from the overall fiscal stance); labor market policies; pricing and marketing policies; transparency and disclosure policies; poverty-reduction and social safety-net policies; pension policies; corporate governance policies (including anti-corruption measures); and environmental policies. To set the stage for what follows, it is worth summarizing the main concerns and criticisms that have been expressed about the IMF's existing approach to structural policy conditionality. These typically take one or more of the following forms. First, there is a worry that wide-ranging and micro-managed structural policy recommendations will be viewed by developing-country borrowers as so costly and intrusive as to discourage unduly the demand for Fund assistance during crises. Even though the cost of borrowing from the Fund (the so-called rate of charge) is much lower than the cost of borrowing from private creditors - particularly during times of stress - we observe that developing countries usually come to the Fund "late in the day" when their balance-of-payments problems are already severe. This suggests that developing countries place a non-trivial shadow price on the policy conditions associated with Fund borrowing. The concern is that if these conditions become too onerous, emerging economies will wait even longer to come to the Fund (as Thailand did in 1997) and/or will turn to regional official crisis lenders that offer easier policy conditionality (e.g., in 1998 Malaysia was one of the first beneficiaries of low-conditionality Miyazawa Initiative funds, and Asian countries could eventually decide to elevate the infant Chiang-Mai swap arrangements into a full-fledged Asian Monetary Fund). The outcome - so the argument goes - would then be even more difficult initial crisis conditions, greater resort to the anti-social behavior that the Fund was established to prevent, and a tendency toward Gresham's Law of conditionality (where weak regional conditionality would drive out not only the unnecessary but also the necessary elements of Fund conditionality).
Microcredit has become one of the most important tools used to combat poverty and to enhance families' wellbeing. This research aims at testing the following hypothesis: microcredit is positively linked to women's socio-economic wellbeing in Cairo. It is of special interest because it is a leader in evaluating this kind of intervention in Cairo; it uses primary source data and has a public policy orientation. The results confirmed what was previously reported in the literature, namely the high correlation between microcredit and children's education, income and assets and disproved studies that found microcredit to improve health and harmony in the family.
Other communication scholars have written extensively about Grameen Bank, its' organizational struc-ture, and its effectiveness
- S L Mckinnon
S. L. McKinnon et al. Other communication scholars have written extensively about Grameen Bank, its' organizational struc-ture, and its effectiveness (Papa, Auwal, & Singhal, 1997).
org's website has changed and no longer lists featured lenders on its homep-age. The present homepage contains squares of borrower pictures with pop-up boxes that offer informa-tion on the borrower
- Since
Since 2009, the Kiva.org's website has changed and no longer lists featured lenders on its homep-age. The present homepage contains squares of borrower pictures with pop-up boxes that offer informa-tion on the borrower.