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Paying back comes first: why repayment means more than business in rural Senegal Author(s): Amelia Duffy-Tumasz Source: Gender and Development, Vol. 17, No. 2, Work (July 2009), pp. 243-254Published by: on behalf of Taylor & Francis, Ltd. Oxfam GBStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27809227Accessed: 28-04-2015 15:01 UTC
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Paying back comes first: why repayment means more than business in rural Senegal Amelia Duffy-Tumasz1
Giving small loans to women has become a mainstay in development practitioners' toolkits. Using data collected for Oxfam America's Saving for Change (SFC) project, this article argues that repayment of micro-credit cannot be used as a measure of
micro-enterprise development per se. Instead, repayment signals the presence of peer
pressure, loan sharing and remittance payments in the studied setting. This conclusion
is borne through an ethnographic approach, which focuses on who accesses loans, how
people who access loans use them, and how borrowers mobilise resources for
repayment. The research indicates that future studies should use ethnography in
tandem with other approaches to evaluation, and concludes with implications for an
agenda seeking to forward women's workers rights.
Key words: Senegal; gender; development; micro-finance; evaluation research
Introduction
Micro-finance has become the development intervention of choice for many practi tioners aiming to reduce poverty and address gender concerns at once (Jackson 1998; Sender 2003). Giving small loans to women for business development is favoured
over other initiatives for two principal reasons. First, giving start-up capital, or micro
credit, for micro-enterprises is seen to catalyse sustainable poverty reduction, whereby donors help poor people help themselves (Daley-Harris 2007). Second, women are the
preferred recipients of these small loans because they tend to repay better than their
male peers (Armend?riz and Morduch 2007). Studies have also shown that income
under female control is more likely to be spent on family welfare, including household
consumption and children's schooling (Blackden and Bhanu 1999; Blumberg 1988; World Bank 2001).2
Reducing poverty, enhancing women's financial autonomy, and translating control
over income into household power are important goals, but the popularity of micro
finance as a silver bullet toward these ends requires critical attention. For instance,
development organisations implementing micro-finance tend to focus on women and
groups of women, masking the complexity of the households to which they belong,
Gender & Development Vol. 17, No. 2, July 2009 743 ISSN 1355-2074 print/1364-9221 online/09/020243-12 ? Oxfam GB 2009
DOI: 10.1080/13552070903009668
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Amelia Duffy-Tumasz
and the budgets that make these households function. Micro-credit is only one of
many streams of income flowing into the household. Livelihoods are made in complex
ways (Grown and Sebstad 1989) and micro-credit is one ingredient in a multi-faceted
process.
Re-thinking how micro-credit is channelled into households has implications for
measuring the impact of these projects. There is a wide gender and development literature discussing the indicators that can be used in assessments of poverty reduction
and the empowerment of women, as individuals and as a collective marginalised group
(Goetz and Gupta 1996; Kabeer 1998). Indicators included in studies of impact require careful attention, since they can become the yardstick of a given project's perceived success or failure to achieve the twin goals of poverty reduction and women's
empowerment.
Using Oxfam America's Saving for Change (SFC) project as a case study in rural
Senegal, this article discusses the aims and methodology of a study conducted there
in 2006-2007. Oxfam's approach is part of a trend for NGOs to implement savings based micro-finance models as part of rural livelihoods programmes (Allen 2006). In
November 2006, I travelled to K?dougou, a region in the southeast of the country to
undertake the study. Its overall purpose was to gain understanding of the economic and
social conditions of people living in the area, and to form a baseline, enabling future
studies to better measure the impact of Oxfam America and La Lumi?re's development efforts. One of the key aims of the research was to understand how the early
implementation stages of the SFC project were proceeding to identify key challenges, if any.
The monitoring and evaluation team attended eight SFC group meetings where
it held focus group sessions, and undertook consultations with staff from a local
development organisation, La Lumi?re, which partnered with Oxfam America to
implement the SFC project. After this short canvassing stage, two resident researchers
who were placed in different villages for 2 months, to complement the team's initial
findings with research informed by an ethnographic approach. I was one of these
researchers.
In this article, I draw on this experience to argue that micro-finance needs to be
seen in context; there are multiple income streams flowing into households as well as
social pressures from within and outside of the household that condition the outcomes
of projects aiming to reduce poverty and empower women. I start by introducing the
village in which I conducted research, and go on to focus on the projects themselves, before outlining the main findings of the research. I argue that the indicators used to
prove micro-credit's impact conceal more than they reveal, and conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for development organisations advocating for
women workers from a rights-based perspective.
244 Gender ? Development Vol. 17, No. 2, July 2009
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Paying back comes first
The research context: a village in K?dougou, Senegal The village in which I lived for two months is situated 700km from Dakar, the capital of Senegal, and 45km from the nearest city. The area is semi-arid. Groundnuts, maize, millet and cotton are the main crops, though okra, tomatoes and onions are available on a seasonal basis. Livestock and petty trading are important economic activities for
those who are relatively well-off, whereas worse-off individuals tend to work for a
wage - for example, on their wealthier neighbours' farms. Peul and Mandinka ethnic
groups are also present, but I worked most closely with the Diakhanke community, which has an active women's association, to which the majority of married women
belong.3 Recent history explains the somewhat segregated nature of the village. Each
ethnic group represents the inhabitants of three distinct villages who were relocated in
the late 1960s, when the boundaries of Niokolo Koba National Park were expanded to
surround these villages. Some brief details of the macro-economic context are also important. Migrant
workers' remittances are important to Senegal's national accounts; a recent estimate
suggests that approximately US$633 million was sent through formal channels in 2006, which amounted to 6.8 per cent of gross domestic product in the same year (World Bank 2008). Recent data suggest that remittances, or cash payments from migrants
living abroad, more than tripled from 1999 to 2006 (see Figure 1). Since money is often
sent via informal channels, such as a visiting relative or friend, these figures are likely underestimates. Neither does this figure include money sent from within Senegal.
The important role that remittances play on a macro level suggests that income
earned elsewhere and sent home may be an important source of cash for SFC
members. Interviews substantiated this hypothesis, recording ten villagers living in
France, nine of which were men. Two other men live abroad - one in Gabon, and the
other in Angola. Remittances sent from within Senegal are also a factor. I came across
three men, working as teachers in different parts of the country, who sent home money from their regular salaries. Considering I was not able to conduct in-depth interviews
with people from all of the 15 households in the Diakhanke section of the village, these
numbers most likely underestimate the total number of individuals whose remittance
payments contribute to expenses at home.
Housing is an obvious indicator to show the extent of poverty, and inequality, of
residents. Modern houses are an indicator that a household is relatively wealthy. Of
the 15 households in the Diakhanke section of the village, thatch-roof huts are
interspersed with eight cement buildings, financed by family members' remittances.
Cement buildings are sturdier, cost more, and are seen as a status symbol, since they are associated with earnings from the city and abroad. These cement buildings
represent the Diakhanke community's relative wealth in relation to the other ethnic
groups in the village.
Gender ft Development Vol. 17, No. 2, July 2009 245
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Amelia Duffy-Tumasz
Figure 1: The value of remittances sent to Senegal, 1974-2006 (million US$)
Ymmr
Over half of the households in the Diakhanke section of the village are polygamous.
Polygamy is another marker of relative prosperity in rural Senegal, because the
practice of paying bridewealth means that a man must pay a woman's family to marry her. Because of the complexity of polygamous household finances, budgets are usually
kept separate rather than pooled. Typically a co-wife is responsible for providing
groundnuts, schooling fees and clothing for her children, while her husband is
responsible for housing, debts incurred by family members, and other forms of
household consumption, such as grains (usually millet or rice) for family meals. Only
relatively established men can afford to take on numerous wives.
The researcher Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) pointed out in her work on the 'patriarchal
bargain' that patriarchy is not the same in every environment, and must be understood
in context-specific ways. Goran Therborn (2004, 116) interprets mass polygamy found
in Senegal as a system that provides co-wives with 'a free space under an overarching male superiority', since they often live separately from their husbands, and assume
significant financial responsibility for their children. Institutionalised male public
authority is evident in the fact that chefs de famille (household heads) were legally
permitted to prevent their wives from working outside the home until 1989, when this
statute was repealed from Senegalese family law (ibid.). Female financial autonomy and male public authority co-exist in the distinct form of patriarchy discussed
by Therborn. In sum, de facto if not de jure male headship persists in present-day
K?dougou.
246 Gender ft Development Vol. 17, No. 2, July 2009
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Paying back comes first
Research methodology Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) highlights not only the importance of context, but the
importance of understanding how women make individual 'bargains' with patriarchal norms throughout their life cycles. Kandiyoti argues that marriage and households are
sites of power and negotiation, and women work from within structures of power like
polygamy to expand their scopes for action. Micro-finance is often offered to women
because development workers take the view that if women are able to control income, this will translate into greater bargaining power with men within their households.
The reasoning is that cash not only helps women meet their practical needs, but also
supports them to meet their strategic need to challenge gender inequality.4 Once settled into my field-site, I examined the individual ways in which women
negotiated space within their marriages and households. I did this by participating in, and observing, women's daily lives. Working alongside women enabled me to build
trust. Often, there would be important pieces to fit into the research puzzle that
informants would only disclose in private, or revealed implicitly through their daily behaviour. Employing an ethnographic approach as a preliminary step in evaluation
research also made sense because researchers can identify important variables to be
measured in future studies, that otherwise would have been overlooked if a survey
approach was taken at the outset.5
Over the course of 2 months, I conducted informal and formal interviews according to the terms of reference provided by Oxfam America. Interviewing village leaders,
attending initial group meetings where members were trained in the SFC approach, and visiting women in their homes, was a good start. But it was not until I started
participating in collective farming work parties that SFC members became most
receptive to my requests for in-depth interviews. Often, the women were simply too
busy juggling domestic, farming and community responsibilities to find time for my
questions. Exchanging my farm work for interviews was an implicit agreement, and
may offer a promising approach for future researchers facing similar challenges. I asked female participants how many
- if any - small loans they had accessed in
the past under the umbrella of other micro-credit schemes, how they had spent the
money received, and how they had found the money to make repayments. Since I was
conducting an evaluation for a project only just beginning, my questions examined
past behaviour as a baseline for future performance. Previous loans had been made to
women by commercial micro-finance institutions (MFIs) and other joint-lending initiatives. Despite the village's remote location, I identified at least three micro-credit
schemes that had been implemented in the 5 years before my fieldwork took place. Two female research assistants acted as local guides, translating from Diakhanke to
French.
Gender ft Development Vol. 17, No. 2, July 2009 247
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Amelia Duffy-Tumasz
The project: Saving for Change Oxfam America's SFC project aims to build on women's savings groups to match
community-mobilised savings with loans lent out at a group level. Oxfam America
started its SFC activities in August 2005 in Mali. It brought the approach to Senegal in
August 2006. In August 2008, Oxfam America announced that it was reaching 110,000 members in West Africa as a whole. Virtually all members of the SFC projects are
women.
The SFC approach is distinct from other joint-lending and commercial micro-credit
models, because it is savings rather than credit-based. The loans are proportional to the
amounts of money that villagers can feasibly save, unlike commercial MFIs that lend
out large sums. The logic is that these large sums can be overwhelming, and lead to
unwise investments. Historically, savings are a primary source of start-up capital for
businesses in much of sub-Saharan Africa (Buckley 1997), so offering relatively modest sums and expecting members to save before taking loans seems appropriate in this
context.
SFC aims to make itself sustainable by rooting itself in the community; it is
decentralised, run by trainers from La Lumi?re staff, and members can replicate the
model spontaneously in neighbouring communities. The groups develop their activities
in line with their perceptions of what is needed: for example, groups in Mali have
promoted a curriculum of education about preventing and treating malaria.
In the village where I lived, the project began in August 2006. Two groups of 15 women each meet weekly to deposit savings that would be lent out to members once
enough capital was gathered. At the time of my on-site research, which began in
November 2006, both groups were still in the saving stages of the project, and had not
yet started to make loans. In the next section I discuss findings based on SFC members'
accounts of previous loans they had taken with other micro-finance agencies.
Findings Peer pressure In order to discuss who accessed loans, it is worth mentioning that the models
discussed here distributed micro-credit. This is distinct from SFC, which acted as a
keyhole into previous credit-based projects. The logic behind group-lending schemes
is that these lower the transactional costs of lending, and the risk that borrowers will
not repay. They rely on borrowers wanting to remain in good standing with their
neighbours, since the 'social capital' that these relationships represent is very
important for survival in tightly-knit communities. If a family breadwinner becomes
ill, for example, strong relationships with one's neighbours can be drawn on in times of
crisis. Micro-finance can make use of members' community standing as collateral for
loans. If one person defaults, then future credit lines are cut off to the group as a whole,
243 Gender El Development Vol. 17, No. 2, July 2009
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Paying back comes first
and the defaulter will become very unpopular. Both commercial and joint-lending projects were among those documented, and group allocation of funds means that
peer pressure exists to repay Studies in settings as diverse as Bolivia, Bangladesh and
Nepal show that women diligently repay to maintain community standing (Brett 2006; Fernando 1997; Rankin 2006).
One elder in explained: 'I borrowed money only once since I didn't dare take out more because I am not in good health and can't really work with the money myself. Another group member who was a widow never borrowed money 'because not being able to repay when the repayment date comes is not good for group integrity'. Yet
another explained quite simply: 'I did not participate since I didn't have the (financial) means. Everyone cannot borrow at the same time. But when you do borrow, you do
everything you can to repay'. These comments exemplify how peer pressure to repay can discourage the poorest women from accessing loans. Since individual repayment default would result in credit being cut off for the collective, relatively poor women do
not demand loans because they are unsure how they would repay. This suggests that
the poorest of the poor may exclude themselves from receiving loans since the social
repercussions of default outweigh the cash that micro-finance makes available.6 Two potential members' self-exclusion from the women's village association further
calls into question the ability of micro-credit to reduce poverty. This is because
subsequent micro-credit initiatives built on pre-existing forms of social capital like the
women's village association to facilitate loan administration and repayment. Paying the
one-time inscription fee (equivalent to US$11) was prohibitive for these two women, and by default, they did not receive small loans from formal credit sources. Neither did
they join the SFC group since membership implied making regular savings deposits to
which they could not responsibly commit. Though membership fees to join already formed groups are an entry barrier with low visibility, the enduring question of how to
reach the poorest of the poor in the micro-finance literature shows that context is
essential when assessing if a given project reinforces or transforms social exclusion
(Fernando 1997; Rankin 2006). Simply put, thinking about poverty as an individual
problem de-contextualises poor people, and prevents improved structural under
standings of the perpetuation of acute poverty. This shows how ethnographic methods can be used to better understand repayment, and other quantitative indicators
commonly used in micro-credit evaluation research.
Loan sharing How women who do access loans use them also warrants careful examination. What
makes micro-credit projects sustainable is the idea that loans are used directly on income-generating activities. Return payment is taken as a proxy for profitable economic activities undertaken by the borrower even though studies suggest that
money lent to women come under male family members' control in Bangladesh, the
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Amelia Duffy-Tumasz
Dominican Republic and other regions in rural Senegal (Goetz and Gupta 1996; Grasmuck and Espinal 2000; Perry 2002).
Ndeye, a woman living as a polygamous wife, provides an interesting example.7 She confided that of the US$50 she received:
T gave half to my husband so that he could buy food. Sometimes I do this. I borrow for people who need it, like my husband and others who aren't group members ... Giving them money isn't the problem. It's when they don't repay that there are problems. When my husband doesn't
repay, sometimes it's a problem and sometimes it's not. But I do everything in my power so that no one knows of this money problem between my husband and me. I have to respect my husband since he is the one that brought me into this family's house'.
Ndeye's account is one example of how male public authority and female financial
autonomy can interact. Publicly divulging consumptive rather than productive loan
use would compromise her husband's dignity. Choosing to share her loan and cover
her husband's default could also be seen as an example of a patriarchal bargain that
provides Ndeye with a platform to extract benefits from her husband in future. When
asked why she thought many women shared income from loans, a village elder
highlighted women and men's differential access to resources over time when she said:
'sharing loans today might mean accessing some of my husband's assets tomorrow'.
That credit was accessible to male elite farmers in the 1970s through state-subsidised
farming cooperatives explains how gendered access to credit is a fluctuating trend. To
assess if men similarly shared their incomes with wives in the past is problematic. But
by transforming income into a sense of long-term indebtedness, some women create an
informal insurance policy rooted in implicit bargains. In lieu of building equity in
independently owned businesses, at least some micro-finance borrowers build social
security through debt accumulation.
Other members admitted that they registered in micro-finance programmes like SFC
in their husbands' place. This phenomenon may help explain why male villagers
overwhelmingly support micro-finance projects, since they have a chance of drawing on the money in women's pockets. It is beyond the scope of this study to know how
male family members repay female micro-credit borrowers, or, if women simply act as 'conduits for credit to men', as Goetz and Gupta (1996, 55) suggest. Either way, the rationale for micro-credit is based on the idea that enhanced household power for women comes from control over business profits. If decision-making power was
increased in Ndeye's and other women's cases, it came from distributing micro-credit
itself, sidestepping enterprise development all together. Loan sharing is another
phenomenon that is ignored when market proxies such as repayment are interpreted outside their given contexts.
250 Gender ? Development Vol. 17, No. 2, July 2009
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Paying back comes first
Role of remittances in repayment
Many scholars have underscored how micro-finance loans contribute to 'consumption smoothing', or, in other words, how micro-credit is used to buy food when stocks are
low (Morduch 1995). It is not uncommon to hear of people 'eating' their money
(manger leur argent) in the context of micro-finance, and more generally in Senegal. This
expression can also refer to any spending besides saving or productive investment like the majority of loan uses documented in this baseline study. However, the persistence of high repayment rates challenges this claim since 'eaten money' would logically be difficult to repay. The mere existence of reimbursement cash suggests that the financial
landscape is more complex than the passerby presumes. If loans are eaten or shared, how do people who do not invest loans in profitable businesses repay?
A mother of ten in her late 40s, Aissatou recalled two loans that she had recently borrowed. With the first, she bought groundnut seeds and a small sheep, using profits from her harvest to repay 6 months later. More recently, Aissatou borrowed the
equivalent of US$40 since one of her daughters had just given birth. She used the
money to buy cloth and soap for her newborn granddaughter despite the micro
finance project's guideline to invest in a micro-enterprise, explaining that she relied on
money she receives from a friend living in France to repay her loan. In effect, Aissatou uses micro-credit as a cash advance on the bi-annual income that remittances provide. The fact that she used her first loan for productive and her second for consumptive uses also highlights the fact that many resources are available not all the year round, but seasonally or on a cycle, in much of agrarian Senegal.
Maymouna is another woman who uses remittances to make her return payments. Her husband left 3 years ago, to find work in oil-rich Angola, but has not called or sent
money ever since. Hoping that his disappearance was out of shame because he could
not find remunerative work rather than because of any threat to his physical safety,
Maymouna has three children for whom she is the sole provider. Her main economic
activity is harvesting groundnuts, highlighting the village-wide trend to use the crop for subsistence as well as for income reserve. She sells a few kilos each week to cover
the savings requirements of the SFC group. She also relies on a friend living in France
to supplement her income. Last rainy season Maymouna ran out of groundnuts and so
borrowed approximately US$10 to buy food for her family. To repay, she called her friend living abroad to help her with repayment. With the money sent, Maymouna
repaid her loan and bought reserve household items like soap and spices for cooking. A recent study documenting how women in Tilogne, Senegal, use money sent from
Dakar, France and the United States to fund tontine (rotating savings and credit
association, ROSCA) contributions (Kane 2006, 110) adds weight to the claim that
remittances play a significant role in micro-credit return payments. While the current
literature on micro-finance and remittances focuses on how commercial micro-finance institutions can more efficiently capture the money sent home, little if no attention is currently being given to how remittances are contributing to an illusion of
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Amelia Duffy-Tumasz
micro-business development in rural settings. This case study suggests that micro
credit is operating as a cheap source of credit not for business, as much as to sustain
villagers given the uneven arrival of remittance payments. While it is outside of the
scope of this study to assess if these phenomena represent micro-loan usage more
generally, ethnographic methods are crucial to identifying categories by which future
data should be disaggregated.
Conclusion
My purpose in this article has been to discuss one case study where the key
assumptions of the micro-finance paradigm do not hold.
I have argued that repaying small loans means more than enterprise development in rural Senegal. Seeing micro-credit as a female enterprise is limiting, and repayment cannot be used as a measure of business development per se. Rather, repayment
signifies a range of inputs flowing into households (and the dynamics therein) that are
often overlooked in micro-finance evaluation research. A methodological emphasis on
market indicators such as repayment masks the social and economic factors that make
livelihoods work, and it is up to researchers and those who design evaluation projects to ask questions that account for the diverse ways in which individuals pay back first.
Ethnographic methods have been used to contextualise repayment, helping to
identify categories by which future surveys should be disaggregated. The role that
remittances play in repayment has largely been overlooked in the literature and this case study has attempted to show how funds earmarked for entrepreneurship can be
transformed into a cash advance on such remittances payments. The extent to which
this phenomenon is representative of other settings is outside the scope of this paper. But if employment abroad could be shown to play as important a role in other
contexts, then the issue of migrant workers' rights in receiving countries might be a
possible focus for future NGO advocacy and research efforts.
Another key point is that there needs to be more attention to the range of inputs into a household livelihood - rather than narrow attention on the loan alone - when
evaluating the impact of micro-finance. Mirroring this point, there seems to be an over
preoccupation with outcomes at the household level, which keeps development researchers, policy-makers and practitioners from asking important parallel questions about how to increase women's collective bargaining power. Micro-finance projects have been important entry points into debates over women's bargaining power in
the domestic sphere, but providing individual women with small loans does not
necessarily create stable employment or a workplace where workers can organise to
publicly contest violations of their rights. In short, providing atomised women
'entrepreneurs' with micro-credit is in itself, no longer a landmark worth celebrating.
252 Gender ? Development Vol. 17, No. 2, July 2009
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Paying back comes first
Amelia Duffy-Tumasz currently researches fisheries trade and its impact on livelihoods in West
Africa for the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in Cape Town. She can be contacted via email
([email protected]) or through the GAD editor's postal address.
Notes
1 I gratefully acknowledge the financial support of Fulbright HE and the Thouron Award
for Anglo-American Exchange. Thanks also to Oxfam America for allowing me to conduct this research, to Sherri Grasmuck and Ellen Foley for their constructive comments on an early draft, and to the participants at the 2008 RAD seminar at the
University of Oxford for their probing questions. The usual disclaimer applies. 2 See Fletschner (2009) for a recent empirical study conducted in Eastern Paraguay that
validates female-targeting in rural micro-credit programmes. 3 In the late 1980s, a government initiative consolidated traditional self-help groups into
legal entities called Groupements de Promotion F?minine (GPF). Like SFC, many other micro-finance initiatives in Senegal build upon these official forms of 'social capital'.
4 See Caroline Moser (1989) for more on the concepts of practical and strategic needs. 5 See Bryman (2004) for more details on this and other issues related to mixed
methodologies. 6 This finding is echoed by another recent study that highlighted the tensions between
meeting short-term personal needs and long-term community needs faced by women in
Thi?s, Senegal (Gu?rin 2006). 7 All names used here are pseudonyms.
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