The loans may be for a few dollars, they may be 100 dollars, but whatever the amount the loans are enough to establish small enterprises that will bring in some money. The Bank employs peer pressure to get its loans repaid, a technique copied by other MFIs. It sets up groups of five to eight borrowers who guarantee each others loans and pressure those who miss instalments. Wood's view is backed up by Anne Marie Goetz of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. She warns that tensions can build between wives and husbands when the men do not pay up.
Examples abound where women have taken loans and ended up worse off then ever.
One researcher cites the case of Edith Kagino who three years ago had a house in the Ugandan village of Kanoikoli and employment in her husband's workshop. In 1991 she opened a savings account with the Ugandan Woman Finance and Credit Trust and later took a small loan to buy two pregnant cows and the materials to build a small cowshed. But she hadn't reckoned on her husband, who far from supporting her insisted she return to work for him. Following a showdown, he turned her out of the house, claimed the animals as his own and sold them. An attempted reconciliation failed.