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Microcredit has been seen in recent decades as having great potential for aiding development in poor developing countries, with Bangladesh being one of the countries which has pioneered microcredit and implemented it most widely. This book, based on extensive original research, explores how microcredit works in practice, and assesses its effectiveness. It discusses how microcredit, usually channelled through women, is often passed to the men of the family, a practice disapproved of by some, but regarded as acceptable by borrowers who have a communal approach to debt, rather than viewing debt as something held by single individuals. The book demonstrates how the rules around microcredit are often seem as irksome by the borrowers, how lenders often charge high rates of interest and work primarily to preserve their institutions, thereby going against the spirit of the microcredit movement, and how borrowers often end up on a downward spiral, deeper and deeper in debt. Overall, the book argues that although microcredit does much good, it also has many drawbacks.
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This book examines innovation as social change in South Asia. From an anthropological micro-perspective, innovation is moulded by social systems of value and hierarchy, while simultaneously having the potential to transform them. Peterson examines the printing press’s changing technology and its intersections with communal and language ideologies in India. Tenhunen explores mobile telephony, gender, and kinship in West Bengal. Uddin looks at microcredit and its relationship with social capital in Bangladesh. Jeffrey surveys imbalanced sex ratios and the future of marriage payments in north-western India. Ashrafun and Säävälä investigate alternative dispute resolution as a social innova...
This book presents a wide-ranging overview of the position of women in Timor-Leste, 15 years after the country secured its independence. It considers the role of women in Timor-Leste’s history, explores their role in the present day economy and politics, and discusses their contribution to culture and society. The contested meaning of gender itself is investigated in the contemporary culture of this new society. It applies a wide range of different feminist theories and approaches, and concludes with a discussion of what new directions gender studies in Timor-Leste might take.
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This book provides a comparative analysis of the social, economic, industrial and migration dynamics that structure women’s paid work and unpaid care work experience in the Asia-Pacific region. Each country-focused chapter examines the formal and informal ways in which work and care are managed, the changing institutional landscape, gender relations and fertility concerns, employer and trade union responses and the challenges policy makers face and the consequences of their decisions for working women. By covering the entire region, including Australia and New Zealand, the book highlights the way different national work and care regimes are linked through migration, with wealthier countries looking to their poorer neighbours for alternative sources of labour. In addition, the book contributes to debates about the barriers to women’s participation in the workforce, the valuation of unpaid care, the gender wage gap, social protection and labour regulation for migrant workers and gender relations in developing Asia.
This book provides an overview of the Japanese sex industry in the years of Japan’s postwar economic boom. It argues that the origins of gender inequality in contemporary Japan resulted from the policies put in place during this period, when there was instituted a “sexual contract” which provided male salarymen whose work was arduous, underpaid and subject to military-like organisation with easy access to women’s bodies, through workplace getaway trips to hot springs resorts, hostess bars, and prostitution tourism to South Korea, as sexual inducement to acquiesce to their own exploitation. Japan’s economic growth, the book thereby contends, came at the price not just of environmental and labour degradation, but also gender inequality.
Economic development in the poorest countries often makes better progress when women become involved in, and take a lead in, development projects. Encouraging women’s involvement, however, is often a major difficulty in societies where traditionally women’s status has been inferior and where women are expected to be domestic and passive. This book, based on extensive original research, considers major projects undertaken by non-governmental organisations in Bangladesh to encourage women’s participation. The book identifies the factors which motivated women to be active, discusses how women achieved the level of capacity and knowledge to enable them to serve their communities appropriately, assesses the major difficulties and recommends how empowerment projects can be improved in future. The book concludes that established institutions and traditional customs are often the greatest barrier to women’s participation.
This book explores how women deal with the realm of marriage in Lombok, eastern Indonesia. It draws on women’s narratives of their marital trajectories, recounting their stories of courtship, marital discord, and experiences of divorce, remarriage and polygamy.
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