The Grameen Bank Experiment: Empowerment of Women through Credit

Abstract

In patriarchal societies, the subordinate status of women signifies a lack of empowerment — in the sense that they are unable to take part in the decision-making processes on an equal footing with men, either within the household or in the society at large. This lack of empowerment is manifested, inter alia, in the relative weakness of their bargaining power in situations characterised by ‘co-operative conflict’, i.e. situations in which it is in the interest of both men and women to cooperate, but in which a conflict of interest is also involved. Most intra-household decisions, including those relating to the allocation of household resources, involve such co-operative conflicts. In situations like these, the party with superior bargaining power can influence the outcome of the co-operative effort in their own favour. The inferior bargaining power of women, entailed by their lack of empowerment, thus biases the allocation of scarce household resources such as food and health-care against them, resulting in inferior nutritional status and poorer survival chances of women relative to men.¹