Development NGOs, Colonialism, Gender and Poverty in Tanzania: A Critical Case Study of Microcredit as a Neoliberal Poverty Alleviation Initiative

• Author / Creator

  Nathoo, Sheineen

• The deployment of microfinance as a neoliberal, market-based, development intervention in the name of poverty-alleviation and empowerment has continued to persist in international development programs, policy and discourses, despite growing critiques which illustrate that it has not significantly reduced poverty, nor empowered women in the Global South. Persistent critical scholarship including empirical studies in Latin America, Asia and Africa over the last ten years have pointedly exposed microcredit as a development project and proponents who claimed this was the solution to global poverty. Instead, microcredit culminated in producing challenges adversely affecting so-called beneficiaries (e.g. mainly urban/rural poor women), while some dominant development NGOs and their sub-contracted small or local NGOs operated as neoliberal agents, complicit in the implementation of the neoliberal development project. Relying on a critical-qualitative research methodology, this thesis elaborates on a critical qualitative case study of BRAC TANZANIA’s (formerly known as Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee) microcredit intervention as a neoliberal development and poverty alleviation strategy. The main purpose of the research and the case study was to develop a critical exploration of microcredit programs as a neoliberal poverty alleviation intervention in terms of its poverty causing, neo/colonial and gendered implications. Methods of data collection included secondary documents, key informant interviews, focus groups and researcher observations. The case study engaged 52 participants of which 44 were borrowers of microloans and ten were staff employed at BRAC who administered the microfinance program. The research was conducted in Dar-es-Salaam in May and June of 2015. Critical-qualitative data generated through this research brings into question how a capital-driven neoliberal penetration strategy has brazenly been promulgated in the name of development and poverty alleviation to further the interests of the agents of capital, including NGOs implementing microcredit, while perpetuating obstinate gendered, colonial and impoverishing continuities.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • Microcredit and Poverty Alleviation
  • Microcredit in Tanzania
  • Microcredit
  • Development NGOs

• Graduation date

  Fall 2017

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Master of Education

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/R3CJ8807H

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.