Constructions of women’s economic empowerment through microfinance in development discourse : a case study of World Vision’s Women’s Self Help Group programme in Eswatini

Abstract

This study focuses on the constructions of women’s economic empowerment in microfinance between World Vision, its partners, and boMake. The study adopts an ethnographic stance and examines the ideologies and governance practices of World Vision’s microfinance empowerment programmes and positions the everyday interactions of women within these programmes. This investigation draws on Foucauldian feminist theory, rooted in Foucault’s notions of governmentality. The study draws on 34 interviews with women, from 6 of World Vision’s self-help groups, 6 of World Vision’s personnel, 1 former World Vision employee and 4 of World Vision’s partners. Using thematic analysis, the dissertation presents a two-part analysis which derives themes from the narratives of World Vision, its partners, and women respectively. The study finds that World Vision seeks to construct women in its microfinance empowerment programmes as entrepreneurial subjects who are responsible for governing themselves on issues of state inflicted economic and intimate violence. However, the study finds that boMake both accept and reject these constructions, and continuously invent their own formula of empowerment, which speak to their experiences, desires, newfound interests, and aspirations. These truths present themselves as subversive strategies towards World Vision’s microfinance interventions, and Eswatini’s integration with the neoliberal global market economy. These creative strategies are based on boMake’s dynamic subjectivities as wives and mothers, who uphold both pious and cultural values of respect, virtue, gratitude, patience, and honour, which neither produce an autonomous nor subservient feminist self. This study finds that boMake’s constructions of women’s empowerment reincarnate themselves along with mutations of microfinance, functioning to shape each other in development discourse. The study highlights the limits and possibilities of feminist self-governance in Eswatini and broader studies that seek to investigate governance of women in global development industry in the global South.