Micro-finance, women’s empowerment and fertility decline in Bangladesh: How important was women’s agency?

Duvendack, Maren and Palmer-Jones, Richard (2016) Micro-finance, women’s empowerment and fertility decline in Bangladesh: How important was women’s agency? Journal of Development Studies. ISSN 0022-0388

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Abstract

It is currently widely argued that Bangladesh’s development achievements have “important lessons for other countries across the globe”, in particular a focus on “reducing gender inequality” (Sen, 2013: 1). A major avenue through which this emphasis has been manifest lies, according to this narrative, in enhancements to women’s agency for instrumental and intrinsic reasons particularly through innovations in family planning and microfinance. The “Bangladesh paradox” of improved well-being despite low economic growth over the last four decades is claimed as a paradigmatic case of the spread of both modern family planning programmes and microfinance leading to women’s empowerment and fertility reduction. In this paper we show that the links between microfinance, empowerment and fertility reduction, are fraught with problems, and far from robust; hence the claimed causal links between microfinance and family planning via women’s empowerment needs to be further reconsidered.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Date of acceptance: 15/02/2016
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
Depositing User:	Pure Connector
Date Deposited:	09 May 2016 08:33
Last Modified:	09 May 2016 08:33
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/58593
DOI:	issn:0022-0388

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