choose two of the people introduced in this section, and answer the following questions.

Microfinance and the Gender of Risk: The Case of Kiva.org Author(s): Megan Moodie Source: Signs, Vol. 38, No. 2 (Winter 2013), pp. 279-302 Published by: The University of Chicago Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/667448 Accessed: 20-09-2017 06:45 UTC

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Microfinance and the Gender of Risk: The Case of Kiva.org

Anyone who wants to discover the relation between risk and social inequality

must reveal the kernel of the sociological concept of risk, namely, that risk

does not exist beforehand only to be distributed in socially unequal ways later.

Risk and social inequality—indeed, risk and domination, risk and power—are

two sides of the same coin. It is part of the logic of risk to polarize, to exclude,

and to stigmatize.

—Ulrich Beck (2009, 140)

M y aim in this article is twofold. First, I ask what a feminist perspective

might bring to current conversations about world risk society. My

understanding of this notion draws heavily on the influential work of

Ulrich Beck and his emphasis on the politics of risk—the extent to which

risk creates and sustains power iniquities (2009, 142). Because risk refers

not only to future threat but also to the possibility that one can make deci-

sions to create alternative outcomes (a modern article of faith), one of the

central political achievements of risk is to divide the world into risk givers

and risk takers. As Beck points out, “risk presupposes a decision, hence a

decision-maker, and produces a radical asymmetry between those who take,

define, and profit from risks and those who are their targets” (140). These tar-

gets are defined by, and available because of, prior social vulnerability. It is

here that I think Beck’s analysis can be pushed further via feminist insights.

I refer to the conditions of social vulnerability that underwrite risk as

“peril.” In introducing the concept of peril, I intend to raise questions that

may contribute to a better understanding of the lived consequences of this

particular form of social vulnerability. It is certainly not the only form, and it

is not easily generalized. Rather, peril, to me, is the necessary supplement of

risk. It consists of those daily threats to life and limb when one just doesn’t

I am grateful to the participants, especially Faidra Papavasiliou, in the 2009 panel of the

American Anthropological Association titled “Transforming Global Material Practice? Dimen-

sions and Perspectives on Change, Sustainability, and Possibility,” where an early version of

this argument was presented, as well as to Caetlin Benson-Allott, Heath Cabot, Susan Harding,

Shuhei Kimura, Anne-Maria Makhulu, Maureen Moodie, Jessica O’Reilly, Scott Reed, Lisa

Rofel, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and the four anonymous reviewers from Signs for questions

and provocations that greatly improved this article. Its shortcomings remain my own.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2013, vol. 38, no. 2] © 2012 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2013/3802-0002$10.00

M e g a n M o o d i e

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have enough and is either subjected to the routine violence of deprivation

or must perform the difficult work of getting by. In the sense that it can be

both the threat of a future state or a lived present that one manages to sur-

vive, peril is quite different than risk, which is only the anticipation of catas-

trophe. Peril’s embodied states include indeterminancy, hunger, anxiety,

apathy, abandon, and fear. A state of peril takes hold when one loses the

ability to plan for the future upon which all risk discourse (and profitability)

depends. Those who can survive the peril that results from not being in-

cluded in the decisions that determine a future course of action underwrite

the gains of those decision makers who do not live in perilous worlds. I

choose the term “peril” to mark both distance from and connectedness to

high-risk financial strategies.

Coping with peril—getting by even when it seems impossible, as well as

providing for those who may not be able to provide for themselves, such as

children and the elderly—is a feminine terrain of work and activity both in

the sense that it is rendered subordinate to risky masculine investment and

in the sense that it is being conducted, in large part, by women in the global

South. This is, I argue, the primary condition of reproductive labor in our

time. Global discourses of risk are gendered such that a particular set of fi-

nancial investment strategies (also known as casino or frontier capitalism)

are coded as masculine in relation to this feminized, often invisible, repro-

ductive labor.1 I suggest that the swagger of high-risk investment depends

on the ability of those who find themselves losing out in the games of global

capital to cope with peril in the domestic sphere. The erasure of the work of

getting by in perilous worlds must be addressed to understand the contem-

porary creation of value: to make risk profitable, it must be converted into

peril.

My second aim follows from the first but is quite different in its scope. I

want to consider the role of microfinance in the conversion of risk into peril,

as I believe it is an important site for this conversion. My object is the wildly

successful peer-to-peer lending website known as Kiva.org. I will show how

Kiva’s creation of technologically and visually mediated feelingful ties be-

tween virtual lenders and borrowers performs a similar social role to that of

the family in mediating the relationship between reproductive and produc-

tive activities. The virtual relationship channels the emotion of lenders in

such a way that they can both distance themselves from any potentially

harmful effects on the borrower (i.e., risks) at the same time that they feel

a connection to that individual borrower located at a vast geographical re-

1 The term “casino capitalism” comes from the work of Susan Strange (1986). “Frontier

capitalism” I derive from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005).

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move and across divides of class or gender. The experience of kinship by the

lender in the global North to the borrower in the South works to neutralize

or erase the financialized aspect of the transaction and the financial links

that preceded it; in other words, the extent to which the ability to loan from

one’s laptop in the Silicon Valley depends on the ability of loan recipients to

cope with peril that may precede (but in many instances is created or exac-

erbated by) microloans themselves.

Microfinance is successful on a global scale (in the sense of being both

popular and taken as the common sense of development) because it trans-

lates risk into peril. This does not, of course, happen for everyone in the

same way. I am not arguing that microfinance alone creates social vulnera-

bility. Rather, I am pointing to the ways in which microfinance operationa-

lizes and sometimes increases social vulnerabilities that precede it, such as

those of race, class, and gender.

We can see the conversion of risk into peril in the ways that microfinance

engages the language of risk to draw social distinctions, at the same time

that it must work to foster a sense of social connection. Put simply, risk in

microfinance is always thought to accrue to the lender but not to the bor-

rower. The loan, not the person, is the site of risk. Within microfinance’s

own discourse, groups traditionally thought too risky to be creditworthy

(particularly poor women) are, in fact, low risk because they are easy to

control. A centerpiece of microfinance rhetoric is the extremely high re-

payment rate when loans are made to groups of women, a phenomenon

often attributed to women’s greater talent for both management and

self-sacrifice—in other words, their ability to cope with the daily challenges

of a perilous world and still fulfill debt obligations. Thus, the growing in-

terest of multinational banks in microfinance, in investing in the poor, in

taking on this risk once seen as far too dangerous (never mind that money

has always been made lending to the poor) depends precisely on a partic-

ular kind of gendered work in households that inhabit perilous worlds.

The separation of these two worlds—the world of risk and the world of

peril—is a necessary illusion for risk to remain profitable. But in order for

these worlds to appear separate, a particular kind of social-emotional bond

must be formed between them. This is what we might call the “virtual kin-

ship” generated by peer-to-peer lending sites like Kiva. And the role Kiva

plays in the relationship between risk and peril is similar to that of the fam-

ily as it has been characterized in many feminist materialist analyses of the

relationship between production and reproduction: providing an emo-

tional, moral grounding for a vastly unequal social relationship.

In the first half of this article, I map out the conceptual terrain I mean to

index via the concept of peril. I then turn to several studies of microfinance,

S I G N S Winter 2013 y 281

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especially of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, which have tended to show that

microcredit lending and borrowing exacerbates women’s social vulnerabil-

ity, in turn heightening peril and the need to cope with its uncertainties

rather than serving as the tool of empowerment that it is taken to be by so-

cial entrepreneurs and development planners.2 Here I wish to highlight the

centrality of domestic forms of work, or reproductive activities, in the struc-

ture and intention of microfinance. The second half of the article turns to

Kiva itself and describes the ways in which the visual and narrative practices

of the organization provide a clear instance of the translation of risk into

peril that underlies all microfinance initiatives.

Frontier capitalism and everyday peril

It is important to remember that investment bankers always receive high

compensation for the deal no matter the result. The higher the risk, the bigger

the deal, the more radical the change, the more money Wall Street makes,

even though a merger or restructuring of a large company is precisely the kind

of transaction that leads to a deterioration of long-term shareholder value.

—Karen Ho (2009, 25)

To really get at the gender of risk, we need to look at the profitability of risk,

captured so cogently by Karen Ho above, which has been an insufficiently

addressed issue in much of the emergent risk literature. Beck’s work on risk

society, for instance, is an important touchstone for my analysis, yet it does

not highlight this profitability to a satisfactory extent. His attention to the

cultural and financial work done through the “staging of the reality of global

risk” (2009, 10) sheds important light on the nature of contemporary po-

litical interventions in the name of risk mitigation; his acknowledgement of

the centrality of social vulnerability to global risk structures is a primary in-

sight into these structures (see, e.g., Beck 2009, 178–79). But while he

draws attention to the way that risk mitigation becomes big business, a risk

2 While I do not provide a new ethnography of microfinance per se, my readings and opin-

ions here are undoubtedly influenced by my own fieldwork with microcredit and women’s em-

powerment in the northwest Indian state of Rajasthan (see Moodie 2008). In this earlier writ-

ing, I was concerned with the on-the-ground workings of microcredit and its unexpected

social consequences; here, I am concerned with global structures and rhetorics of micro-

finance. While I would still argue that we cannot assume the effects of microloans outside

of any particular context, the rapid expansion of supposedly development-oriented lending

since my original fieldwork in 2003, as well as its embrace by the high finance sector, has

dramatically shifted the terrain.

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industrywith“largeandgrowingmarketsfortechnologies,experts,counter-

experts, and products” (50), he does not go far enough in his considera-

tion of the global value of risk itself, perhaps because he does not consider

the specific formations of vulnerability (like gender) that are central to risk

society.

So how is risky (and potentially very profitable) capitalism gendered

masculine? While it is important to remember the simple sociological fact

that there are more men in positions of authority that allow them to engage

in the highly valued risk taking of high finance, it is not enough to map risk

and peril onto male and female bodies. We must always keep in mind that

other notion of risk: the creation of those “at risk” to embody antisocial

ways of living, who are also often men. The distinction that matters is one

between those who can take risks and those who are risks simply by existing.

Thus, when I point to the seemingly bifurcated gendering of risk, I am

saying less about women and men and more about a series of representa-

tional practices that make particular configurations of power make sense. In

this case, these representational practices rely on a distinction between the

domestic sphere, where the work of reproducing life happens, and the pub-

lic sphere, which is the site of politics, production, and the social. Because

public/private distinctions—and their corollary Marxist categories, pro-

duction and reproduction—have popular salience and a rich scholarly his-

tory, they provide a good analytical form for my argument. My analysis

here, as should be apparent from the title of this article, is indebted to Mar-

ilyn Strathern’s important text, The Gender of the Gift (1988), both for its

form and its conception of gender. Strathern moves us away from notions

of gender that are simply about “men” and “women”—as if these were not

precisely that which gender norms seek to create—and toward “those cate-

gorizations of persons, artifacts, events, sequences, and so on which draw

upon sexual imagery—upon the ways in which the distinctiveness of male

and female characteristics make concrete people’s ideas about the nature of

social relationships” (ix). Certainly a division between domestic and pro-

ductive labor is central to how social relationships have been imagined in

the modern North and has salience for material relations of production and

reproduction. My thesis is that the commercial value of risk is created by the

conversion of risk into peril, a gendered process. This conversion depends

on social-economic relationships that demand that daily, bodily peril be

borne by those whose social vulnerability can be exploited and amplified.

It is therefore the focus on how difference—in this case, a gendered differ-

ence—is mobilized in this exploitation and amplification that I consider

feminist and not simply that microfinance is aimed at women (although this

is surely also the case).

S I G N S Winter 2013 y 283

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I want to briefly point to three important insights from recent work on

global capitalism in order to support my argument that freewheeling, risky

financial strategies are gendered masculine. First, the creation of the scale of

the global, without which today’s risky financial strategies cannot achieve

their goals, creates and relies upon norms of sociality that are coded mascu-

line: competition, first past the post, kill or be killed. And it is precisely the

global that provides the tropes for separation and connection that I am

identifying as central to the conversion of risk into peril. Anna Lowenhaupt

Tsing (2005) has shown that the ability to conjure up the scale of the global

is one of the successful sleights of hand of frontier capitalism. The frontier,

as described by Tsing, is necessary to produce the fiction of discovery that

enables large-scale dispossession; it also carries with it all the echoes of mas-

culinity and the menace of cowboy justice. The value produced in these

frontiers only comes from its having been tamed or wrested from a state of

nature (and from those who reside in that state of nature). Dangerous foes

must be vanquished. In this scenario, something must be lost—violence is

necessary for value creation. Risk therefore creates both the global and its

remainders, the rubble of “ordinary catastrophe” that can be expected into

collateral damage (Tsing 2009).

The second insight is that risky investments are seen as agential and en-

trepreneurial in themselves. As Ho reminds us in the quotation with which

I opened this section, the investment strategies most highly valued are those

that involve the greatest risk. However, the funds—the savings, homes, and

hopes—put at risk in these strategies are rarely those of the individuals or

firms making investments. In other words, the risk of the investment is sep-

arate from its actual lived effects. Ho’s work with Wall Street investment

bankers is an important window into the ways in which risk comes to be val-

ued in itself. As volatility is the nature of the Wall Street employment market

(its culture), investment bankers reproduce this culture as they actively con-

struct the cycles and crises that have much more dire consequences for those

who are not among the privileged risk takers. If the most worthwhile people

live in a state of risk and make profits from risk, risk itself must be part of what

it means to have value. Returning to the language of production and repro-

duction, risk taking is production devoid of any reproductive necessities.

Risk must obscure the prevalence of ordinary catastrophe or, on an even

more mundane level, the need to cope with daily peril.

The third important site for the gendering of risk returns us to Beck’s ar-

gument that risk society creates a risk industry in order to protect against

risk. I take this kind of protection as the other side of a patriarchal imagery

that involves the risky agency described above. Risk-as-value/agency and

the understanding of risk mitigation as protecting one’s family are two sides

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of the same gender complex. Risky investing produces the need to mitigate

against risk; the vagaries of masculine authority produce the need for pro-

tection from its arbitrary exercise. It is no wonder that the imagery used in

insurance advertisements, for instance, relies on middle-class, heterosexual

norms to portray a responsible and “happy family man” (Patel 2006, 38). At

the same time, buying protection against risk distances those who exercise

risky agency from any harm (i.e., peril) that might ensue from such risks.

Looking at the above examples should foreground for us the question of

what happens when risky strategies don’t work out. Who picks up the

pieces when a house is lost to the bank or a natural disaster, or life savings

disappear overnight, or a friend doesn’t pay you back on time, or the crops

fail from drought; or the national currency is devalued as quickly as a broad-

band connection transmits data? Those who do not get to set the terms of

risk live with peril, the experience and expectation of potentially cata-

strophic events that have just happened or may come to pass. As masculine

risk is structured around the necessity of (and the necessary sectioning off

of) peril, its supplement is femininized. As should also be apparent, the

question of who must inhabit perilous worlds is a question of prior social

vulnerability that is not reducible to the gender of individual bodies and yet

is highly gendered.

Perilous worlds are worlds of work; peril is not annihilation, though

there are cases in which peril is tantamount to social or literal death; farmer

suicides in India during drought years are one example (see Patel 2006).

But peril is the constant threat—punctuated with periods of acute lack,

whether in the form of hunger or social support or political voice—of not

being able to get by. Survival often involves extreme deprivation and yet

engenders forms of ingenuity or self-discipline that often work despite the

odds. In fact, what is most striking about perilous worlds are the crea-

tive ways in which they are navigated. It is this kind of cobbled together,

jerry-rigged, good-as-long-as-it-lasts management of food, clothing, and

shelter—those domestic necessities—that, I am arguing, makes coping

with peril the condition of reproductive work in our time for poor women

who are the intended beneficiaries of microfinance.

The pioneer on the frontier and the high-stakes investment banker rely

on the safety net of domestic management: the savings club, the sister net-

work, the creative cookery, the precise portioning, the fast. This, Marxist

feminists have long told us, is one of capitalist production’s conditions of

possibility, whether under slavery or high industrialism. Yet with the arrival

of microfinance, something about this relationship has changed dramati-

cally. Whereas in the past reproductive work was seen as a shadow or infor-

mal economy, today its virtues are extolled, capacities taxed, and practices

S I G N S Winter 2013 y 285

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codified in the development world of microfinance (Elyachar 2002). This

shift in microfinance rhetoric, however, is not the same thing as recognizing

or bringing to light the dependence of capitalist production—or financial

risk strategies, for that matter—on reproductive work. Quite the contrary.

The substantialization of informal economies in the rhetoric of microfi-

nance entails obfuscating precisely the conditions that put people into peril

to begin with. It is this obfuscation that is performed through “peer-to-

peer–ness,” the virtual kinship of lending organizations like Kiva, a point

I elaborate below.

Before turning to this task, I want to point out that, when I posit a re-

lationship between Wall Street–style high-risk investment and microfi-

nance, this relationship is both formal and material. It is formal in the sense

that the “financialization of everything” under neoliberalism (Harvey

2005, 33) includes phenomena ranging from subsistence activities to de-

velopment to global markets. Both Wall Street and the vast majority of mi-

crofinance institutions (MFIs) work within the terms of neoliberalism—

thus we can expect them to echo one another in ways that are at times un-

canny. But the relationship, and these echoes, are not only a question of

ideology or historical coincidence. They are also quite material. In the last

twenty years, more and more mainstream banks have gotten into the micro-

finance business, and MFIs have adopted Wall Street “best practices,” often

at the behest of Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), the moni-

toring arm of the World Bank, the mission of which is the full sustainability

(i.e., financialization) of the microfinance industry. As Milford Bateman

(2010) points out, these practices include market-based interest rates, the

end of subsidies through the mobilization of savings, a shift in focus from

poverty-alleviation outcomes to growth and outreach (i.e., the extension of

services to more and more clients), and the incentivization of managers at

levels approximating those found on Wall Street (14). This is what Ananya

Roy identifies as “minimalist microfinance” (2010, 45), which is minimalist

in the sense that it is not bogged down with the question of poverty allevi-

ation. A new alliance between microfinance providers and multinational

banks, such as Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, that seeks to financialize de-

velopment and draw in the world’s poorest consumers means that it is hard

to tell where Wall Street ends and microfinance begins.3 Not only are banks

3 As an example of the amounts of money involved, Citigroup posts on its website that “the

Citi Foundation has been supporting the microfinance sector for more than 25 years and over

the past 11 years has granted more than $80 million in support of 365 microfinance and mi-

croenterprise programs in 60 countries” (Citigroup 2009, 22). But it is important to keep in

mind that this only includes money invested via its nonprofit foundation, not investments

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pursuing the extension of financial services to the poor, but the microfi-

nance industry has borrowed assessment tools from the banking industry,

such as measuring the success of various MFIs on the basis of their “portfo-

lio at risk” or on the balance of outstanding loans (see Roy 2010, 30–33).

Indeed, for the leaders of this “new wave” of microfinance (Bateman

2010, 3), the goal of microfinance is not to be found in outcomes related

to poverty but in the financial independence of the MFI itself—in the crea-

tion of an “asset class” or circuit of investment (Roy 2010, 51).

The management of risk to investors is a central concern in this new field

of microfinance, and private banks are reluctant to undertake this risk on

their own—but they are happy to gain when this risk turns profitable, as

when a microfinance institution begins to be publicly traded. So, for in-

stance, it is not uncommon to have government or international donor

backing as a cushion against loss when a private bank begins lending to the

poor (Roy 2010, 54). Other risks that are identified include those associ-

ated with collection: the risk of a giant bank appearing immoral by chasing

poor women for tiny amounts of money, for example. Roy remarks that “in

order to hedge such moral risk, the [microfinance industry] promotes link-

ages between commercial banks and microfinance institutions. Such rela-

tionships outsource the practices of discipline and punishment to nongov-

ernmental organizations, thereby allowing banks to enter frontier markets”

(55). In the next section I explore some of the literature that has studied

these “practices of discipline and punishment” on the ground, but here I

want to mark that the discourse of risk that is central to the world of micro-

finance is one focused on the lender, not the borrower.

The perilous world of microfinance

Even while microcredit has become enshrined as the global solution to pov-

erty, and in particular to women’s poverty, the social scientific and feminist

literature on microfinance as a lived practice has remained intensely skepti-

cal and critical.4 This is, I want to suggest, because observers of microfi-

4 My assessment here is of a general trend, or mood, in the literature, and not of individual

authors who may or may not find positive aspects to microfinance. Outside of industry publi-

cations, even positive reports on microfinance rarely report the kinds of results that the indus-

try claims for itself. So, for instance, while Naila Kabeer’s analysis (2001, 2005) of programs in

Bangladesh may provide an important corrective for how we think about empowerment and

may question the Western benchmarks that have so far been implemented to show microfi-

made by subsidiaries or other wholesale partnerships (see MicroCapital 2006). Inclusion of

such partnerships would undoubtedly increase the total a great deal, but as of the time of this

writing I have been unable to locate such a sum.

S I G N S Winter 2013 y 287

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nance on the ground are noting two related aspects of the social life of mi-

crofinance: it does not work sufficiently to actually mitigate peril (that is, to

take people out of cycles of anticipating and living through crises of food

and shelter), and microfinance can itself exacerbate the condition of peril

in which many women already live. And yet microfinance is ironically touted

as a particularly important step toward the empowerment of women. A brief

examination of some recent literature on the microfinance institution ex-

traordinaire, the Grameen Bank, will help me illustrate this point.

The Grameen Bank, which is truly the world’s flagship microfinance in-

stitution, was established by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh in 1983.

Since its founding, the Grameen Bank has grown beyond its initial mission

of lending capital to poor women for their preexisting entrepreneurial ven-

tures to include loans for housing, tube well construction, mobile tele-

phones, and fishery cooperatives, among many other endeavors. The num-

ber of programs working to replicate its model worldwide has also grown at

an exponential rate. Indeed, the Grameen Bank model of microfinance has

become enshrined as one of the primary paths to poverty alleviation.5 While

there is a great deal of debate over mission drift and the shift of focus from

poverty alleviation within the microfinance field itself—particularly de-

bate between what might be called the Bangladesh consensus (see Roy

2010) and the new wave of microfinance promoted by CGAP (see Bateman

2010)—it is undoubtedly the case that the Grameen Bank, even in its incar-

nation as Grameen II, is the international face of microfinance.

Despite Grameen’s tremendous popularity and extensive reach, how-

ever, not everyone agrees that microcredit is a miracle cure for poverty or a

clear avenue to women’s empowerment, either in the Grameen Bank case

or elsewhere. In his detailed study of the Grameen Bank, Aminur Rahman

(1999)reportsthat women who borrow from Grameen aremore likely tobe

victims of violence from both male relatives and unrelated moneylenders.

He remarks, “despite the success of the Grameen Bank in delivering loans

to poor women and bringing socioeconomic changes to many of these

women’s households, my findings suggest that there are still many bor-

rowers who become vulnerable and trapped by the system. . . . The burden of debt on individual households in turn increases anxiety and tension

5 Here I am referring to what we might think of as the original Grameen Bank mission,

which is still the prevailing representation of Grameen’s ideology despite the fact that its prac-

tices have changed entirely under Grameen II (see Bateman 2010, 18–19; Roy 2010, 110–18).

nance’s failures, this is a far cry from claiming that it is the panacea it has been represented as

being. Her work also points to the fact that the successes of microfinance may be the result of

forces that have nothing to do with how a lending project is structured—for instance, the cha-

risma of the individual borrower or the political mission of the lending organization.

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among household members and produces new forms of social and insti-

tutional dominance over many women clients in the program” (3). Thus,

not only is microfinance not achieving its central goal—economic self-

sufficiency for the poor—it is also not achieving its tangential “virtuous spi-

ral” (Mayoux 1999) goal of collaterally empowering women; rather, it is

shoring up forms of authority in the household. Here we should pause to

note the social locus—the household—because what we are seeing is the

transformation of risk into peril. The risk here is the perceived risk to banks,

which they take on when deciding to loan to the poor; the idea is to make a

profit, in the end, on this risky endeavor. Peril arises for women not only be-

cause they are borrowing money, a practice that, admittedly, existed long

before the advent of the Grameen Bank, but because they are submitting

to new, stringent repayment guidelines at the same time that they are en-

couraged, indeed prodded, to take on more debt. I return to this point in

a moment.

Rahman’s findings are confirmed by those of Lamia Karim (2008), who

focuses on the importance of a patriarchal “economy of shame” (6) in up-

holding the return rates—upward of 98 percent—that make Grameen

Bank appear to be profitable and thus a worthwhile risk for investors.6 But

while the Grameen Bank model assumes a self-employed woman who is an

“out-of-the-home entrepreneur” (14), it is often men who actually use the

loans; they are justified in doing so by deeply entrenched systems of gender

inequality and kinship obligation (Rahman 1999). Further, estimates with-

in the microfinance industry itself are that 50–90 percent of all microcredit

goes into funding consumption—getting food or paying medical costs—

rather than into enterprises at all (Bateman 2010, 204). This is because the

poor borrowers to whom microfinance is directed live in peril; the needs of

the present engulf them too quickly. These needs are taken care of in the

realm of the domestic and through the feminized work of getting by.

My point here is that we must never lose sight of the kinds of activities

that are undertaken through microfinance loans. They are predominantly

domestic in nature—reproductive—even when they are sold as goods or

services outside the domain of the household. The purchase of poultry or

livestock, stitching, food preparation and sale, seed purchase, and so on

make up the bulk of microfinance initiatives, at least on paper. As econo-

mists Susan F. Feiner and Drucilla K. Barker note, these are all informal sec-

tor jobs and always “constrained by domestic responsibilities” or achieved

6 Yunus often refers to the high repayment rates of microcredit loans as an indication of the

effectiveness of the loan group form and women’s inherent creditworthiness (1999). The

numbers themselves—always cited as being above 90 percent—appear to be problematic,

however (see Pearl and Phillips 2001).

S I G N S Winter 2013 y 289

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in tandem with these responsibilities (2006, 10). What the loans are actu-

ally used for is another matter, but it should give us pause that many observ-

ers of microfinance in South Asia report that dowry, a site of social repro-

duction par excellence, represents an extremely important unofficial site of

investment—an observation confirmed during my own fieldwork in India.

Women are not being invited to pursue the heavily valued and risky strat-

egies of global capitalism through microfinance. There are no initiatives

that I know of to teach rural women in India to learn the Mumbai stock ex-

change. It is not proposed that women in South Africa prospect for new

mining opportunities. I am not suggesting that any of these are goals or vi-

sions we would want to pursue, simply that microfinance is always already

coded as feminine by virtue of its scale (micro, small, domestic), activities

(reproductive), and relationship to peril. In the second half of this paper,

I turn to the popular peer-to-peer microfinance lending website Kiva to

push this discussion of the relationship between microfinance and repro-

ductive work even further. Frederick Engels’s enabling insight that repro-

ductive work in the household is obscured by the economic and emotional

centrality of the social institution of the family is my point of departure

here. Engels demonstrates that one of the main tasks of capitalist produc-

tion (not an incidental social by-product) was to create “‘free’ and ‘equal’

people” who can “dispose freely of their persons, actions, and possessions”

([1884] 1972, 142). This was achieved, he contends, by making sexual

love, as a voluntary arrangement between two people, necessary to moral

marriage (144). Thus, the sociality of the economic relationship was as im-

portant as the economics of sociality. Like the family, peer-to-peer Internet-

mediated relationships create a fiction of specialness, destiny, and commen-

surability that erases the extent to which the risk agency of the lender relies

on the recipient’s ability to cope with peril.

Kiva and peer-to-peer sociality

First, the organization and its website: Kiva is an immensely successful

peer-to-peer network designed to let relatively wealthy lenders in the global

North select worthy entrepreneurs in the global South to whom they can

loan money directly. Since its inception in 2005, Kiva has loaned over

$100 million, with $60 million of this being lent in 2009 (P2P-Banking.com

2009). Like most microfinance initiatives, Kiva boasts an impressive repay-

ment rate—97.88 percent at the time of writing.7

7 For continually updated statistics, see http://www.kiva.org/about/stats.

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The organization itself is based in San Francisco, and its staff includes for-

mer employees of PayPal, eBay, and other Bay Area tech companies. Its

founders, Matt Flannery and Jessica Jackley, were working with Tivo and

Village Enterprise Finance, respectively, when they started the website, re-

portedly just as a hobby for friends and family. While completing an MBA at

Stanford, Jackley had traveled to East Africa, where she had seen microfi-

nance in action. Flannery visited her there, and after several months and a

bit of media exposure, the two decided they could run Kiva as a full-time job.

Kiva’s setup seems quite simple. Potential lenders are greeted with the

photos and stories of “entrepreneurs” across the globe to whom they can

loan $25 or more.8 Entrepreneurs’ narratives often include biographical da-

ta and a bit of information about their intended business, as well as the dol-

lar amount they think will allow them to fulfill their needs. Each lender then

forges an individual economic relationship with an individual borrower,

and lenders get to evaluate a borrower’s need and entrepreneurial potential;

importantly, they can also have a one-on-one relationship with “their” bor-

rower via email messages sent through the website. One of the responsibil-

ities of Kiva Field Partners is precisely to facilitate this form of direct com-

munication (volunteers also provide translation services). It is this aspect of

Kiva—its peer-to-peer–ness—that seems to have made it so successful.9

In articles and interviews, Jackley describes the mission of Kiva as bring-

ing people together through stories. Her work focuses on using the peer-

to-peer network form to connect people across the globe in more human-

izing ways. Jackley repeatedly stresses the importance of connection via

technology. In the face of real human interaction, even interaction that is

mediated by the forms and flows of the Internet, people cannot remain sep-

arate but necessarily forge a special bond. The peer-to-peer quality of the

site creates the sensation that, as one Kiva employee put it, “you really know

where your money is going” (Modi 2008). It is also what makes Kiva and

the kind of microfinance institutions it supports different than traditional

charity. Lenders feel satisfaction about lending, but part of this satisfaction

derives precisely from the idea that one is helping others to help themselves

8 See http://www.kiva.org/lend. 9 Kiva itself makes money mostly through private donations, called “optional lender fees,”

though it is very interested in beginning to offer loans with interest. Private donors include Sil-

icon Valley entrepreneurs and online lenders, who can choose to put a certain amount toward

the website’s maintenance during their checkout process. Kiva also collects interest on funds

held in its accounts during a thirty-day waiting period before fund distribution to partner orga-

nizations—what it calls “float.” In other words, because loaned money has usually already been

promised and dispersed by the in-country partner, Kiva is able to create an interest-accruing lag

in its turnaround.

S I G N S Winter 2013 y 291

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(rather than providing charity), a centerpiece of neoliberal approaches to

poverty alleviation.

Consider the following testimonials, posted on the Kiva website, from

three different lenders:

I still come back to look at the faces of those whose loans I’ve helped fund. I

feel as if their stories have become part of me, and I learn so much more about

the world around me by learning about the world around them. I read the

human stories at Kiva.org and realize just how far a small amount of money

can stretch for someone who is striving to work to better themselves and their

families and their communities . . . and their world. Our world. While others in my family collect “things,” I collect stories of hope and desire, and the

willingness to work to make dreams into reality.

—Diane

When I was young my parents would give financial help to our church and

our neighbors. It was a lesson in giving that has stayed with me for 100

years (my age). Later as a nurse I saw first hand the needs of others on many

different levels and believe that giving can improve lives. It is easy to give

when you can see how your money is being used. During my younger years I

did not have a TV or computer to watch the results of my helping others

globally. How wonderful it is that we can now check on the Internet to see

how our money is being used in various countries in desperate need of de-

velopment. Over the years I have found that helping others not only improves

their lives, but enhances my own.

—Liane

Conventional investment wisdom is to have a diversified portfolio of invest-

ments; this was the first time I considered emotional rewards as something I

couldexpect besidestheoccasional dividend.It certainlyis habit-forming, and

I gain a sense of community in a redeeming cause. I have also enjoyed leveling

the playing field a little bit for women in the developing world.

—Steve10

In these three statements we see the recurrent themes of Kiva lending: con-

nection through stories, the ability to use technology to see where money is

going and exactly how it is “making a difference,” and the ability of capi-

talism and entrepreneurialism to empower women across the globe. But

what is also striking is the emotional register of the comments. Diane feels

the stories of borrowers are “a part of ” her; Liane sees Kiva as in line with a

hundred-year lifetime of valuing Christian charity that “enhances” her own

life; Steve comes to value “emotional rewards” as much as dividends.

10 Liane’s and Steve’s testimonials are available online, at http://www.kiva.org/press

/lenders. Diane’s testimonial also appeared on this page but has since been taken down.

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Such responses are structured by the site itself, which moves between

individual stories and the more familiar presentation of investment data; in

addition, thereisanelaboratenetworkandtechnologicalapparatus forlend-

ers to access when they become a part of Kiva, including Kiva-related web-

sites not directly sponsored by Kiva such as Kivafriends.org and Kivapedia

.org. On the Kiva site, lenders can keep track of their loans, rate individual

entrepreneurs for future lenders, and create virtual investment portfolios

but always retain the underlying philosophy that the humanness of Kiva is

essentially different from banks. As we saw in the above testimonials, Kiva

depends on this emotional investment and markets its humanity. According

toKiva’s president,PremalShah,unlike banks,KivalenderslikeSteve“value

emotional returns” (Frontline 2006). In addition to the kinds of testimo-

nialslisted above,storiesaboundofindividuallendersgoingtothecountries

of “their” entrepreneurs to visit or of borrowers writing long messages

about how the loan money has changed their lives. Relationships are at the

heart of Kiva.

Or so it seems. In point of fact, if you click on someone’s face and story on

Kiva and donate, your money actually goes to an in-country MFI that has

partnered with the site. It is this institution that is responsible for the distri-

bution of funds, repayment, and monitoring the borrower’s business. It is

an in-country field partner, and not Kiva staff, that deals with the day-to-day

technicalities of giving and collecting on loans. And it is the field partner that

may charge and collect interest (most field partners charge an interest rate of

around 40 percent). Kiva itself does not charge interest, and lenders’ money

does not go to service interest payments on the loan that is disbursed via the

MFI.11 While Kiva has a screening process for these field partners, they do

not have any follow-up mechanisms on the ground to investigate what hap-

pens once lenders’ money reaches the MFI. Jackley says publicly that this is

because field partners are the “real experts” and that Kiva is just taking on

this one little piece of the microfinance world, providing funds to micro-

finance institutions already doing good work around the globe (Jackley

2009). There is silence, however, on the subject of what Kiva would or

could do in the face of serious grievances—of the kind cited above from

Grameen Bank borrowers—from an individual borrower. The approach is

part of a seductive neoliberal logic: Field partners should not be patronized

with external evaluation and follow-up; the poor do not need supervision,

just access to capital. Yet this same structure means that an organization like

Kiva has absolutely no accountability to the people served by its partners.

11 Kiva explains its relationship to in-country field partners and the charging of interest on

its website (see Niemira 2009).

S I G N S Winter 2013 y 293

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To be fair, the structure of Kiva is laid out quite clearly on the organiza-

tion’s website; it is not a secret that money goes to partnered in-country or-

ganizations. Yet, when blogger and research fellow at the Center for Global

Development David Roodman created a post “exposing” that Kiva loans

did not go directly to individuals but to microfinance institutions, thus mak-

ing “the person-to-person donor-to-borrower connections” marketed by

Kiva “partly fictional” (Roodman 2009; see also Strom 2009), he generated

something of a scandal. It seems that the scandal tells us more about the

structure of the lenders’ expectations—their desire to believe in the possibil-

ity of a one-to-one connection—than about the actual workings of the or-

ganization. After Roodman’s post and in light of its self-proclaimed dedica-

tion to transparency, Kiva was forced to change the language on their home

page from “Kiva lets you lend to a specific entrepreneur, empowering them

to lift themselves out of poverty” to “Kiva connects people through lending

to alleviate poverty” (in Strom 2009). Of course, many came to Kiva’s de-

fense, and the overall effect of Roodman’s exposé seems to have been to

bring more attention to Kiva and microfinance rather than to somehow de-

bunk either the organization’s claims or the microfinance model.

Aside from the issue of emotional returns, Kiva also traffics in the gender

ideologies typical of microfinance around the world. Jackley reports that a

speech by Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus at Stanford was the

real inspiration for her decision to pursue microfinance work in Africa. As

we have seen, Yunus’s work selling microfinance on a global scale has cre-

ated and relied on the notion that women are better—and more needy—

borrowers who are more likely to use money to make changes that benefit

society. Kiva quickly found out that the idea of microfinance as empower-

ing to women in the global South sells. Matthew Flannery writes, “Lenders

showed unambiguous preferences according to region, gender, and busi-

ness type: Africans first, women first, and agriculture first. A female African

fruit seller? Funded in hours. Nicaraguan retail stand? Funded in days. A

Bulgarian taxi driver? Funded in weeks” (2007, 50). On one hand, this is

clearly part of a traffic in images with deep colonial and missionary roots:

a distant third-world woman is made to stand in for problems of poverty

and underdevelopment, and support for this woman works to emotionally

suture over the violence of capitalist exploitation (see Mohanty 1984). A

billboard that appeared at the Palo Alto exit of Highway 101 south of San

Francisco is a telling example.12 In the photo, two women who are likely Af-

rican—though their specific ethnicity is not given, nor is their location (in

12 As of June 15, 2012, a photo of this billboard was available at http://www.wiseclerk

.com/group-news/servicesmicrofinance/kiva-kiva-billboard-advertising.

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Eastern Africa? in California?)—share a cheerful smile as one adjusts the

other’s earring. We as viewers do not know why these women are happy,

or what earrings have to do with microfinance, but we must assume that

something Kiva has done has made them this way. We get the emotion

without the narrative. The trick of the website, however, is that it links the

emotion connected to the anonymous third-world woman with a name and

a story. It is precisely the forging of an emotional-social bond with the in-

dividual entrepreneur that gives the emotional returns to Kiva lenders.

Thus, we have a new kind of traffic, one that, as I have been arguing, allows

distance and closeness at the same time: I, as lender, can reap emotional

benefits privately through my laptop or in the privacy of my individual life,

should I choose to pursue a real relationship with “my” entrepreneur.

Risk for whom?

Consider Kiva’s webpage titled “Risk and Due Diligence” (table 1). De-

spite the convincing social science literature pointing to the ways that mi-

crofinance, with its repayment obsession, puts women in fiscal and phys-

ical danger, it is clear that the risk of microfinance is to the lender, not to

the borrower. According to Kiva, these risks to the lender arise at three

levels. The first is entrepreneur risk, in which an individual borrower de-

faults on his or her loan and is unable to pay back the lender. At this level,

the risk is that the lender will lose money because a particular borrower

does not live up to his or her end of the deal. The second is risk at the level

of the field partner, including the possibility that the partnering microfi-

nance institution goes bankrupt, defrauds Kiva, or simply has “poor op-

erations,” which means it cannot distribute and collect funds efficiently.

The third level of risk is that to the country, referred to as “macro-level.”

These occur because of catastrophes of three sorts: economic, political,

and natural. In other words, Kiva warns lenders that they must remember

they are loaning money to volatile and environmentally endangered loca-

tions and that a catastrophe may simply not allow them to collect on their

loan.

The Kiva approach to risk is telling. It refuses to engage with, though it

gestures toward, what it might mean for individual borrowers to be subject

to any of the events cited as risks. Why would a borrower default, beyond

simple trickery? We never know. What does it mean for the daily life of an

entrepreneur in Uganda to borrow money during an unforeseen drought

year? What happens to borrowing groups when whole nongovernmental

organizationss dissolve or go bankrupt? The focus is on the life of the loan,

not the life of the borrower, but the affiliation created between two individ-

S I G N S Winter 2013 y 295

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Ta b le

1 . K iv a. o rg ’s “ R is k an d D u e D il ig e n ce ” w e b p ag e , as

it ap p e ar e d in

2 0 0 9

R is k 1 : B o rr o w e r R is k

R is k 2 : F ie ld

P a rt n e r R is k

R is k 3 : C o u n tr y R is k

“ E ac h b o rr o w e r is sc re e n e d b y a lo ca l K iv a F ie ld

P ar tn e r

b e fo re

b e in g p o st e d o n K iv a’ s w e b si te . T h e F ie ld

P ar tn e r

lo o k s at

a v ar ie ty

o f fa ct o rs

(p as t lo an

h is to ry , v il la g e o r

g ro u p re p u ta ti o n , lo an

p u rp o se , e tc .) b e fo re

d e e m in g a

b o rr o w e r as

cr e d it w o rt h y . H o w e v e r, a n u m b e r o f fa ct o rs

ca n re su lt in

b o rr o w e rs

d e fa u lt in g , su ch

as :

“ W h e n y o u le n d to

a b o rr o w e r, K iv a d e li v e rs th e fu n d s to

th e lo ca l F ie ld

P ar tn e r. . . . W h il e w o rk in g w it h F ie ld

P ar tn e rs

in cr e as e s th e li k e li h o o d th at

y o u r lo an

w il l b e

e ff e ct iv e ly u se d an d re p ai d , n e w in st it u ti o n al ri sk s ar e

in tr o d u ce d su ch

th at

e v e n if a K iv a E n tr e p re n e u r is ab le to

re p ay , K iv a L e n d e rs

co u ld

st il l lo se

p ri n ci p al d u e to , fo r

e x am

p le :

“ W h en

le n d in g in te rn at io n al ly , it is im

p o rt an t to

co n si d er

‘m ac ro -l ev el ’ ri sk s:

(1 ) B u si n e ss

is su e s (e .g ., cr o p fa il u re )

(1 ) B an k ru p tc y (e .g ., th e F ie ld

P ar tn e r m ay

g o o u t o f

b u si n e ss

an d b e u n ab le

to co ll e ct

y o u r lo an )

(1 ) E co n o m ic

(e .g ., a la rg e cu rr e n cy

d e v al u at io n —

o r th e

in st it u ti o n o f e x ch an g e co n tr o ls b y lo ca l g o v e rn m e n ts —

m ay

re d u ce

o r re n d e r th e F ie ld

P ar tn e r’ s lo ca l cu rr e n cy

co ll e ct io n s v al u e le ss

fo r y o u ).

(2 ) H e al th

is su e s (e .g ., m al ar ia , H IV

/ A ID

S )

(2 ) F ra u d (e .g ., st af f m e m b e rs

at th e F ie ld

P ar tn e r m ay

e m b e z z le

fu n d s)

(2 ) P o li ti ca l (e .g ., m an y lo an s p o st e d o n K iv a ar e

d is b u rs e d in

th e d e v e lo p in g w o rl d . P o li ci e s ca n ch an g e

re g ar d in g fu n d s re p at ri at io n o r e v e n th e re q u ir e m e n t th at

b o rr o w e rs

h av e to

re p ay

th e ir lo an s) .

(3 ) O th e r is su e s (e .g ., th e ft , p ay in g fo r sc h o o l fe e s, o v e r-

in d e b te d n e ss , re d u ce d re m it ta n ce s, ci v il d is tu rb an ce s,

e tc .)

(3 ) P o o r o p e ra ti o n s (e .g ., th e F ie ld

P ar tn e r m ay

h av e

p o o r m e th o d o lo g ie s fo r sc re e n in g e n tr e p re n e u rs

o r

co ll e ct in g re p ay m e n ts )”

(3 ) N at u ra l d is as te rs

su ch

as a fl o o d , ts u n am

i o r d ro u g h t

m ay

g re at ly re d u ce

th e li k e li h o o d o f lo an

re p ay m e n t fr o m

ce rt ai n co u n tr ie s o r fr o m

sp e ci fi c re g io n s in

a co u n tr y .”

If a b o rr o w e r d e fa u lt s, K iv a F ie ld

P ar tn e rs ar e e x p e ct e d to

p u rs u e co ll e ct io n s ac co rd in g to

th e ir n o rm

al p ra ct ic e s. In

ad d it io n , K iv a as k s an d e x p e ct s th at

al l o f o u r F ie ld

P ar tn e rs

ad h e re

to th e C li e n t P ro te ct io n P ri n ci p le s fr o m

th e S m ar t C am

p ai g n .”

N o te : S o u rc e , K iv a. o rg , h tt p :/ / w w w .k iv a. o rg / ab o u t/ ri sk , 2 0 0 9 .

This content downloaded from 128.114.34.22 on Wed, 20 Sep 2017 06:45:35 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

uals in different locations—the kinship of lender and borrower—works to

create the illusion that they are engaged in a mutual task.

The virtual mutuality masks the real peril to which borrowers are subject,

peril that has in some cases been created by microfinance itself, as when

women become trapped in cycles of debt. And this is not even to mention

the myriad sources of peril that are not the stuff of Kiva narratives. One does

not read of abusive husbands who take loan disbursements, or of threaten-

ing moneylenders who must be appeased after one has had to take a second

loan to pay back the Kiva loan and maintain a preferred borrower status.

Yet, in looking closely at borrower profiles and the blog posts written by

Kiva Fellows (volunteers who travel to visit partner microfinance initiatives

at their own expense), there are inklings of these absented, other stories. If

one takes the peril of the borrower as the narrative starting point, a different

picture of microfinance might emerge. An illustrative case is provided by a

March 12, 2009, article titled “The Other 2%” and posted to the Kiva Fel-

lows blog by Andrea Bouch, who worked with the Foundation for Assis-

tance for Small Businesses (Fundación de Asistencia para la Pequeña Em-

presa; FAPE) in Guatemala. Bouch reports that while she thinks Kiva’s

2 percent default rate on its loans is “phenomenal,” as a fellow she had vis-

ited with women who were behind on their loans. Here is her narrative at

length:

Yesterday I visited four clients who all are at least 1 year behind on

their loan payments. Only one client is a Kiva borrower, but the stories

are all very similar. Most of the women had something go wrong: a

health issue, a death in the family, a sudden unexpected cost, etc.

But all of them had overcommitted themselves to multiple loans

from multiple banks. So when things start to head south financially

it’s three times as hard for them because they have three banks knock-

ing on their door . . . . So what do you do when your name is on the dunce list and your debt gets larger everyday? No, seriously, what do

you do?

In the cases of the women I met with yesterday: one proposed a

long-term payment plan with smaller monthly payments, another

cried and cried and asked for a year of leniency, another pretended she

didn’t know what we were talking about, and the last client went to

her husband and asked for his help in repaying the debt . . . . The microfinance institutions want to protect their reputation and

with the level of transparency that Kiva provides to lenders, the de-

fault and late payment rates are right there for the world to see. Thus,

many MFIs choose to essentially insure their loans for late payments

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and they have shiny ZEROS next to those stats. But that doesn’t

mean that they don’t have late and defaulted loans (Bouch 2009).

The discussion that follows this post addresses in large part the issue of what

lenders know or sign up for when they loan money though Kiva, with many

lenders saying that even though they like to get full repayment on loans so

that they can loan again, they consider their lending on Kiva a donation and

regard a 2 percent risk as extremely minimal. Again, risk here is risk to the

lender. Notably, not one of the commenters was particularly concerned

that such examples might show that microloans were not ultimately em-

powering the women involved.

Bouch does not tell us what the resolution to any of these particular cases

was, but her sympathies are to some extent with the women she reports

meeting the previous day, even if she remains committed to the microfi-

nance vision in the end (her final concern is for how the “lending commu-

nity” feels about defaults). If we push her text in another direction, though,

it seems that in talking to borrowers who are late in payments, Bouch is

forced to confront the peril in which they live in several different ways. Con-

sider the reasons cited for not being able to make payments: “a health issue,

a death in the family, a sudden unexpected cost.” These are domestic ex-

penses that families, especially women, must increasingly bear given the re-

traction of welfare services worldwide (see Sassen 2000). None of them is

frivolous or negotiable; none involve individual greed that can be patholo-

gized. Although it is not explicitly stated, there is also an implicit link be-

tween these reasons for default and the dangerous overborrowing from

three banks at once that so concerns Bouch. As readers we are meant to un-

derstand that taking out multiple loans is a financial strategy to get ahead,

one that turns out to be a bad idea in situations of instability. It is as if the

insecurity that makes repayment of three loans at once impossible comes

from outside the situation of borrowing itself. But what if we reread these

two paragraphs together so that it is the utter necessity of grappling with

these unexpected costs of living for women and their families that compels

them to take on more debt than they can reasonably manage? All three

banks make a profit on their “risky” investment in the poor because the risk

is transferred—as peril and the wherewithal to withstand it—to poor female

borrowers. And what of the woman who asked for “leniency”? Or the one

who “cried and cried”? Surely there is some sense in which these are sympa-

thetic figures (especially when juxtaposed with another woman who “pre-

tended she didn’t know what we were talking about”). Although we are not

privy to their stories, we can again assume that they have to do with the un-

expected turns and necessities that must be dealt with in perilous worlds.

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It appears that Bouch’s story of defaulters in Guatemala did catch the at-

tention of Kiva. In June of 2009, another Kiva fellow, Jeremy Lapedis,

posted an update titled “An Unfortunate Case of Fraud” on the borrower

pages of four women from FAPE. According to Lapedis, FAPE discovered

that these women did not use the money they were given for its intended

purpose but instead pooled their money together to buy a plot of land; be-

cause this land had not yet produced, the women were unable to pay back

their loan. The post concludes “FAPE is working hard to recover the money

from your loan.”13 Are these the same four women encountered by Bouch

some months before? If so, it appears that their financial strategy was not

simply to take out multiple loans but to try to invest in a different form of

wealth than those entrepreneurial models encouraged by Kiva and its field

partners. The “unfortunate fraud” could also be seen as an effort to expand

the scope and potential of microfinance, to turn the instability of loans into

the stability of land. If not, what are the local conditions in Chimaltenango,

Guatemala, that are encouraging such borrowing and producing these de-

faults? What are their links to global trends? The FAPE field partner entry on

Kiva’s website mentions that the program’s default rate is high “due to the

difficulty some Kiva entrepreneurs have experienced in repaying their loans

as a result of the global economic crisis.” What does this look like on the

ground? These stories are not part of the peer-to-peer relationship forged

between lender and borrower because they would serve to put that very re-

lationship into a broader context in which the fiction of care and emotional

kinship that underwrites Kiva’s program would be untenable. To perform

this kind of contextualization is to raise dangerous questions about the re-

sources one may risk as a lender and the lack of resources of those who in-

creasingly confront the perils of loan taking itself, in addition to daily forms

of want, violence, and dispossession.

Conclusion

In 2009, I attended a public conversation with Jessica Jackley at the Inter-

national Museum of Women in San Francisco. During the follow-up ques-

tion and answer period, Jackley was asked whether microfinance really

made the kinds of structural changes that were necessary to alleviate poverty

and what the negative consequences of microfinance might be, to which

13 While all of the web references in this article are publicly available and do not involve

joining or registering with Kiva or any associated organization, in the interest of protecting the

borrowers’ identities (or at least not publicly labeling them as “defaulters”) I have chosen not

to provide the links to these postings or to the individual women’s borrower pages.

S I G N S Winter 2013 y 299

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she replied, “I’ve only seen positive things happen.” It is precisely this em-

phasis on experience and the personalization of microfinance that allows

risk to be transformed into the peril of daily life for many microfinance bor-

rowers. One’s experience, and not, for instance, the critical social science

literature or even the reflections of Kiva’s own fellows, becomes the basis

for knowing and analyzing problems and relationships that are always kept

at an institutional distance. In this sense, Kiva performs a kind of social-

emotional work similar to that of the family, as shown in now-familiar fem-

inist analyses of the relationship between production and reproduction: it

provides a moral imperative for and legitimacy to what is essentially a rela-

tion of great iniquity.

The relationship between the family and virtual kinship is both formal

and material. On one hand, I hope to have shown how the virtual sociality

created by Kiva works to hide the traffic between masculine and feminine

domains—in this case, between risk and peril. On the other hand, I have

suggested that the work of managing in perilous straits is reproduction par

excellence in the era of the global risk society. Thus, our analysis of this so-

ciety must include attention to the work of getting by that takes place largely

in households in the global South and is performed largely by poor women

in positions of prior vulnerability. The solutions proffered to problems of

poverty, and to women’s poverty in particular, should point us to the issues

at stake: manage risk for lenders in wealthy countries, subcontract peril to

poor women in the global South—and perhaps make a profit in the process.

Nowhere is it suggested that we reassess the value of reproductive work or

that the work of keeping heart and body together in the face of (planned)

cycles of crisis and want is itself difficult, innovative, and inherently worth-

while. It is this last point that I think development planners, philanthropic

entrepreneurs, and even many feminists are missing as they embrace and ex-

pand the world of microfinance. We would do well to return to earlier de-

bates on the family, production, and reproduction as we traverse the era of

virtual kinship. And we would do well to continually ask of world risk soci-

ety: risk for whom?

Department of Anthropology

University of California, Santa Cruz

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