Unpacking ‘win-win’: How feminists interrogate microfinance

This chapter explains some of the important ways in which feminist scholarship in the domain of gender and development has problematized the feminist romance that Fraser describes by disentangling the agendas of capitalist accumulation and women’s emancipation. It shows that how gender, as a category of analysis, has been deployed in ways that have opened up new questions, insights and understandings at the level of both policy conceptualizations and their trajectories in the field. The chapter also shows that how feminist research has offered us a critical reading of the discursive/representational shifts that constituted women in poverty as deserving and worthy of development assistance, in consonance with the rise of both the ‘anti-poverty’ and the ‘efficiency’-based gender planning paradigms in the past two decades of the 20th century. The win-win hypothesis rests on the claim that microfinance-centred development interventions alleviate poverty and empower women, even as they offer the prospect of commercial viability and profit margins for lending institutions.