M Bateman & P Hawkins From Microcredit Evangelism to Digital Utopianism | SOAS University of London
Channel: SOAS University of London
Date: 2019-12-17

From Microcredit Evangelism to Digital Utopianism: The Unstoppable Rise of the Global Microcredit Industry was a seminar given by Dr Milford Bateman & Dr Penelope Hawkins at the Department of Development Studies, SOAS University of London on 3 December 2019. Find out more at http://bit.ly/36LHv9u 

The global microcredit model is one of the most astonishing market-driven financial sector interventions in recent economic history. Its rapid rise to prominence from the 1990s onwards led to expectations that global poverty would be eradicated in short order. As even long-time microcredit advocates now lament, these heady ambitions have been almost entirely dashed. The global microcredit industry has created instead a world of reckless lending and predatory finance aimed at the poor, a financial model that has become associated with mounting levels of individual over-indebtedness, collateral losses, increased vulnerability and other problems for the poor clients, while the suppliers of microcredit have, as perhaps was intended, been seen to enjoy quite spectacular profits. These mounting problems have recently been exacerbated greatly, however, thanks to the rise of fintech (financial technology) platforms that are able to instantly disburse large volumes of microcredit. This innovation began in Kenya with the help of M-Pesa, its iconic money transfer platform, but it has very rapidly spread to all corners of the Global South. With the microcredit evangelists like the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Dr Muhammad Yunus, now being displaced by the digital utopians, such as Bill Gates and his eponymous Gates Foundation, the global poor thus stand to be disadvantaged as perhaps never before in recent history. The global microcredit industry has been exposed as largely nothing more than a Wall Street-style predatory finance and technology operation hiding under cover of ‘helping the poor’. The need to identify, validate and promote alternative social justice-based and development-driven forms of community-owned and controlled finance has never been more urgent.