By Brianda Romero Castelán

A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit

Written by Joanne Meyerowitz

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021, 311 pp.

Where did the idea of fighting underdevelopment and exclusion "one tiny loan at the time" emerge? When did women become the “deserving” poor?[1] How do these trends impact our understanding of global poverty and gender disparities today? And what does Ronald Reagan have to do with all this? Joanne Meyerowitz answers these questions in her new book. Despite a few omissions, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit is a timely and insightful addition to the literature on gender and development.

Focusing on the years between 1960 and 1980, the author describes two parallel and interconnected transformations in the global development movement. The first half of the book relays the fall from grace of the modernization projects that industrialized nations—namely, the United States—promoted in developing countries during the 1960s. These projects intended to reduce poverty (and thus, prevent the spread of communism) indirectly by fostering macroeconomic growth.[2] When they failed to alleviate the suffering of impoverished populations, appeals for redistribution schemes gained traction on the world stage.[3] At the same time, the international campaigns against poverty took a 180-degree turn toward a “basic needs” approach.[4] Small-scale anti-poverty initiatives directed at individuals and communities replaced the old regime of macro projects aimed at governments.[3]

The Global South’s attempts to restructure the world economy and balance the playing field ultimately fell on deaf ears.[4] The rise of neoliberal economics—highlighted by the election of Ronald Reagan as president of the country that controlled the world’s largest source of economic assistance—forced international and non-governmental organizations to abandon the ideal of global redistribution. Instead, they decided to move away from the basic needs approach that provided training, services, and transfers to the poor toward market-oriented solutions.[5] Foreign assistance became increasingly privatized, opening a path to the microfinance era.[6]

In the second half of the book, Meyerowitz explains how the beneficiaries of this assistance gradually shifted from developing governments to poor men and then to impoverished women. Until the 1960s, women were rarely mentioned in discussions about international development, except as “excessive breeders who needed to curtail their reproduction” or as child-bearers whose value resided in shaping “the next generation of men.”[7] The concept of Women in Development (WID) did not appear until the late 1970s, coinciding with the rise of a global feminist movement, the convening of the World Conference on Women, and the negotiation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).[8] International recognition of women’s rights as human rights came hand in hand with acknowledgment of their role in development beyond reproduction. Under the WID framework, women were finally considered income generators and critical pieces in the development discussion. However, Meyerowitz’s story is not exclusively one of empowerment and emancipation: emphasis on indigent women was plagued by the reaffirmation of stereotypical gender roles and practices, which reinforced power dynamics across regions and genders.

In a short piece for Medium, Elizabeth Bruening summarizes the canons that defined who was worthy of charity in three distinct moments of history. For Pre-Christian Romans, generosity was reserved for citizens. For Church Fathers during late antiquity, charity was for the virtuous. By the Victorian era, idleness in particular marked one as unworthy of assistance.[9] In the present era, Meyerowitz finds the key marker of worthiness for international aid is female self-sacrifice. Under the WID agenda, women became the world’s deserving poor only partly because they were disproportionately deprived. More important was their reputation as responsible parents who, unlike men, spent their incomes on their children and not on themselves.[10] Without questioning the power imbalances that led to the unequal distribution of reproductive labor in developing nations, international development organizations promoted the image of the selfless, entrepreneurial mother as the poster child of the anti-poverty movement of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Microfinance champion and Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus summed up the zeitgeist of the era: “A man thinks of himself first. A woman thinks of her children.”[11]

To be certain, the recognition of women as economic actors deserving assistance was a hard-won accomplishment of civil society groups and women advocates working in government and development institutions. Nonetheless, the reassertion of stereotyped gender roles in a space intended to support women’s empowerment is undeniable and problematic. This phenomenon closely resembles the problems that gender experts Darren Rosenblum and Alice Miller have identified in the global women’s rights movement. Rosenblum shows how the emphasis that the CEDAW put on the subjugation of women may have reinforced the idea of the sex binary, with men exerting superiority over women.[12] Miller writes that while stressing women’s vulnerability to sexual exploitation successfully captured international attention on the problem of Violence Against Women (VAW), this framing could also reaffirm regressive ideas of female sexuality.[13] “Women makes demands and ladies get protection,” she quips in the title of her article.[14] In Meyerowitz’s tale, women make appeals and mothers get aid. 

In the context of WID, women’s needs were also interpreted through the lens of victimhood. This was problematic in two ways. First, international development institutions repeatedly failed to account for women’s agency, knowledge, and expertise in the Global South.[15] Second, rooting victimhood in local discriminatory practices allowed Global North analysts to deflect from how industrialized countries, in pursuing their interests, continuously damaged economic conditions and human rights in the developing world.[16] For instance, Meyerowitz argues that the United States prioritized foreign aid recipients that would advance the country’s geopolitical objectives during the Cold War, even though this sometimes meant funnelling resources to governments that were grave human rights violators.[17]

The common theme of Meyerowitz’s two parallel stories is that women became the focus of international development efforts when redistributive justice was no longer attainable. Ironically, anti-poverty advocates began supporting microcredit programs at the same time that developing countries were experiencing a profound debt crisis as a consequence of the World Bank’s and International Monetary Fund’s conditional loans.[18] A linguistic trick helped hide this contradiction: “[d]ebt spelled danger, but credit held promise.”[19]

For Meyerowitz, the promise seems too good to be true. In her opinion, the rise of the microcredit did not serve to address the systemic inequalities women experienced. Rather, it ended up causing more harm than good. Of those women who took “tiny loans,” the majority could not make their businesses succeed but nevertheless bore burdens of risk and sacrifice for their families. This fed into a sexist narrative on parenting responsibilities that persists still today.

Meyerowitz’s prose is simple. Her chapters are cohesive and clearly organized, her paragraphs are well-structured, and her sentences are concise. The text offers a detailed chronological account of domestic and international power struggles and the politics, institutions, and actors that shaped international development as we know it today. Nonetheless, the many factors and characters she strings together to prove her argument make some sections of the book a difficult read. The level of analysis frequently shifts between the system, the state, and the individual without warning. At times, the book could use a mental map to help the reader keep track of how dozens of names fit into a single story.

The author’s arguments are broadly compelling. She gives a remarkably detailed and insightful account of how politics within and between competing organizations influenced the design of international development policies. Nevertheless, her explanations at times seem oversimplified. The rise of the microcredit era did not entirely eliminate other types of economic development assistance, nor did international development become completely privatized. Government agencies from a variety of developed and developing countries, as well as intergovernmental organizations, still play a central role in implementing development programs. It would have been interesting to learn how these different types of aid interact.

Additionally, there are some conspicuous omissions. While Meyerowitz devotes ample space to individuals from the Global North who helped shape the international development complex, the leaders of these same movements in the Global South remained largely nameless throughout the book (with the notable exception of Yunus). She also fails to question the division of economic assistance along binary gender lines, which was unexpected, given that she has previously authored texts on the history of transsexuality. Perhaps the story was already too complicated to justify additional layers of nuance.

Undoubtedly, there is no easy way to tell the story of how development got to where it is today. After all, in Meyerowitz’s words, “[i]nternational development was (and is) a tangled thicket of politics, economics, justice, and condescending benevolence.”[20]

About the Author

Brianda Romero Castelán is a second year MA candidate at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. Her interests lie at the intersection of human rights and development.

Endnotes

1. Joanne Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty: The Lost Promise of Redistribution and the Rise of Microcredit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 2,

2. Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty, p. 17-19.

3. Ibid., 4.

4 . Ibid., 2.

5. Ibid., 2.

6. Ibid., 58, 60, 65.

7. Ibid., 210.

6. Ibid., 142.

7. Ibid., 101, 497.

8. Ibid., 10, 11.

9. Elizabeth Bruening, “The Undeserving Poor: A Very Tiny History,” Medium, January 6, 2018, accessed October 2, 2021, https://medium.com/@ebruenig/the-undeserving-poor-a-very-tiny-history-96c3b9141e13.

10. Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty, 130.

11. Ibid., 209

12. Darren Rosenblum, “UNSEX CEDAW, or What’s Wrong with Women’s Rights,” Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 20, no. 2., 2011, p. 104.

13. Alice Miller, “Sexuality, Violence against Women, and Human Rights: Women Make Demands and Ladies Get Protection,” Health and Human Rights 7, no. 2, 2004, p. 22.

14. Ibid., 17.

15. Meyerowitz, A War on Global Poverty, p. 116.

16. Ibid., 118.

17. Ibid., 166.

18. Ibid., 184, 193.

19. Ibid., 184.

20. Ibid., 5.