“Accountability and women's empowerment: a case of Microfinance and Grameen Bank”.

Abstract: Microfinance is the small-scale provision of financial services to poor people, particularly to women. Over the last four decades, the World Bankhas promoted microfinance as a key tool for addressing poverty alleviation and women’s empowerment (Weber, 2016). Hence a key question here is this –why do microfinance organisations so specifically target women? A crucial reason is to address concepts of gender inequality and hence addressing women’s empowerment as an issue. Drawing on Tanima (2015), thisstudy uses Mayoux’s concept of competing ideological orientation of –financial sustainability, poverty alleviation and feminist empowerment –to bringattention to the issue of accountability of NGOs towards poverty stricken women. As Tanima observes, mainstream accounting has focused mostly on shareholder value, performance matrices and benchmarking and wealth maximisation (Tanima et al., 2020). Accordingly, the issue of accountability towards marginalised perspectives in the NGO and microfinance context has received minimal attention (Alawattage et al., 2019, Tanima et al., 2020). Thisstudy focuses on addressing this gap, through a key question:how do microfinance organisations address accountability towards the primary beneficiaries of microfinance –the poor class women (Jacobs et al., 2012)?Through illumination of the Grameen Bank model (a highly regarded bank), and interviews with two microfinanciers in Bangladesh, the study finds that while from a philosophical point of view microfinance has a strong empowerment angle for women, the realities surrounding this tell a different story. The study reveals the critical aspects of microfinance –for example, regarding why women are targeted, how they are targeted, and what kinds of realities it underpins them in. The question of accountability and participation is important here –how do microfinance organisations hold themselves accountable to women? The account provided here illuminates that the problem with the microfinance model is that it predominantly focuses on repayment rates as a way of measuring success, and ultimately women’s empowerment. This study argues to bring changes within this landscape