Gendered micro-lending schemes and sustainable women's empowerment in Nigeria

Micro-lending to poor women has burst upon the development scene to offer a veritable strategy for women's empowerment in developing countries. Despite the powerful logic of this strategy and donors' commitment to it, there is lack of field-based data regarding whether the strategy really supports the sustainable empowerment of poor women. Relying specifically on definitions of women's empowerment offered by Keller and Mbwewe (1991) and Ashford (2001), and data emerging from my fieldwork in Nigeria, I argue that there is little evidence that the strategy promotes the goal of sustainable women's empowerment. While micro-credit schemes increase poor women's access to incomes, they often fail to help women step out of their culturally defined boundaries. Rather, the strategy merely supports the kind of empowerment that never goes beyond marginal improvements in small areas of poor local women's life, leaving unchallenged the critical issues of women subordination and gender inequality.