Financializing Public Goods

Abstract

The historically recent and spectacular growth of microfinance has brought millions of people newly into the reach of global financial markets. This growth is not only quantitative; microfinance is also expanding qualitatively into new realms. Organizations that include the World Bank and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seek to use credit to expand poor people’s access to education, healthcare, irrigation, water and sanitation (watsan)¹, and other goods and services. In doing this a growing range of programmes now disburse small loans that augment or supplant the state’s and other collectivities’ roles in the provision of public goods. Through supplementary mobilizing narratives, whereby service providers, poor people and microfinance institutions can unite for a “win-win” situation, these new programmes are making resources such as watsan amenable to the market as potential new terrains for financial accumulation. Once again, certain symptoms of poverty are interpreted as, and made into, problems of finance.