Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development by Ananya Roy

Author:Ananya Roy
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-04-22T21:00:00+00:00

The Performance of Dissent

The 2006 Microcredit Summit, held in Halifax, Canada, was a celebration of the Bangladesh consensus. Emboldened by the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yunus and the Grameen Bank, speakers at the summit repeatedly cast doubt on CGAP best practices. The most dramatic of these performances came from Shafiqual Haque Choudhury, the founder and president of ASA. In a plenary session on institutional action plans held on November 14, 2006, Choudhury spoke after a well-received presentation by Ingrid Munro of the pro-poor Kenyan microfinance organization, Jamii Bora. Choudhury boasted of the rapid growth of ASA, claiming that his organization had achieved in 12 years what it took BRAC 24 years to build. “We are the lowest cost microfinance provider in the world,” he insisted. “We are the McDonald’s of microfinance. We operate through standardization and decentralization. McDonald’s provides cheap and affordable models. We provide microfinance.”

At first, the message seemed in keeping with the global discourse of best-practice microfinance, for which ASA has long been the low-cost darling. Repeatedly ranked as one of the top ten global MFIs by the MIX, ASA seemed to be claiming a mantle of greatness in the wake of Grameen’s fall from grace. Once hailed as the “Ford motor model of microfinance” (Fernando and Meyer 2002), Choudhury’s McDonald’s analogy seemed to now present ASA less as an efficient assembly line churning out microloans and more as a nimble network of franchises rapidly serving up a standardized formula. At Halifax, Choudhury proudly declared that by the global standards established by CGAP—from productivity to FSS—ASA was a success.

However, Choudhury’s narrative was more complex than a proclamation of CGAP-endorsed success. In just a few minutes he shifted to a bitter rant against “Western” consultants and their control of the circuits of development knowledge:

We run our own programs. We did not get them from Harvard. We designed them . . . We don’t need people educated in the US to tell us how to manage our accounts and calculate our finances. What are accounts? Debit and credit. A right side and left side. We don’t need to attend long and expensive courses in Europe and America to learn how to do microfinance, or to cook or to drive . . . Consultants come from the West and they charge 800 euros a day and stay in five-star hotels and study poverty.

Turning to Sam Daley-Harris, founder and president of Results, he continued: “For you Sam, a dollar is a coin. For a Bangladeshi, it is two kilos of rice.” “We do the work to serve poor families. We know who the poor are, what poverty is. But if we

don’t hire a few academics with Ph.D.s they won’t believe that we have done the work.” Choudhury’s speech received wild applause from the Microcredit Summit audience. Attendees, many of them from the global South, leapt to their feet, showering him with bravos and cheers. Choudhury emerged as the folk hero of the summit, wrapping himself in the aura of the Bangladesh consensus.

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