Last night I was reading a New York Times review of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s new book on the Black Church. Early on, the reviewer noted an important but underappreciated aspect of the church during slavery: its success in breaking slaves’ social isolation from one another. The reviewer quotes the scholar Mary Rivers Legree explaining this dynamic to Gates. “In slavery,” she noted, “you couldn’t do down the road and visit anyone…. Gathering [in church], they not only prayed, but after services were over, they could talk to each other about who might have a baby up the road, who might have died, and who was sold.” The reviewer concludes this brief reflection by saying that to Gates, “the Black church is the soil in which Black culture and political action flowered.” In other words, those simple gatherings laid the groundwork for massive progress over time.
That insight sent me back to my roots in microfinance. During my years living in rural Bangladesh, I noticed that for many of the women members, particularly married Muslims, the weekly center meeting at which Grameen Bank business was conducted was one of the few, if any, opportunities to network amongst their peers and be relieved of childcare responsibilities. They gossiped, traded recipes, and laughed. It was clearly a respite from the isolation many of them experienced the rest of the week.
Studies about Grameen, BRAC and other Bangladeshi microfinance programs back this up. In a 1996 paper titled “Rural Credit Programs and Women’s Empowerment in Bangladesh,” written by Syed Hashemi, Sidney Schuler and Ann Riley (and summarized along with many other studies in a 2005 Grameen Foundation publication written by Nathanael Goldberg, who later went on to do terrific work at Innovations for Poverty Action), the impact of being part of a structured, group-based microcredit program on empowerment was measured.
The authors measured nine aspects of empowerment, such as mobility, economic security, not being dominated by family members, and roles in decision-making. It turned out that Grameen borrowers were seven times more likely to be empowered than non-Grameen borrowers in non-Grameen villages, and the figure was nearly as significant for BRAC borrowers. Interestingly, the composite empowerment score for women not involved with either program but who lived in a village where these programs were active were 2.5 times more likely to be empowered, compared to those in villages where neither program existed – suggesting that women’s empowerment can be contagious, an encouraging possibility.
Powerful impacts from formal and informal social institutions on how people experience society and their own sense of agency is sometimes hard to discern, much less measure rigorously in the manner Hashemi, Schuler, and Riley did many years ago. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t real.
Whenever I start to doubt the profound social and economic impact of microfinance in Bangladesh and beyond, I think about my field observations and related studies that confirm them. I found it fascinating that the Black church, even (or especially) in the age of slavery played a similar role that center meetings have for the tens of millions of microfinance clients. Apart from the hotly debated issues of economic gains made by microfinance clients, these social connections and improvements may be as important, if not more so.
This is worth bearing in mind during times like these, when microfinance is largely off the radars of the international media and philanthropy thought leaders. Regardless of who is paying attention, at any given moment, there are hundreds of thousands of microfinance clients who are meeting with their peers to engage with a microfinance institution and in the process, strengthening essential relationships that can lead to that hard-to-define but still very real phenomenon of empowerment.
Perhaps this insight is one more way to understand how devastating the pandemic-induced isolation imposed on rich and poor alike has been, and why so many people seek to break free of it, often at their own (and others’) peril.