Since the early 1990s there has been a rapid increase in interest in and funding for micro-enterprise programs for women in developing countries. Multilateral and bilateral donor agencies like the World Bank and USAID have supported programs as part of their anti-poverty initiatives, while other development agencies adopted micro-enterprise as part of a new “market realism,” hoping to increase efficiency in women’s income-generation projects. With Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank as a model, many have argued that women-focused micro-finance programs are effective not only in reducing poverty but in empowering women. In this paper prepared for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development in preparation for the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, the author surveys the evidence and finds that despite occasional successes the majority of programs fail to have a lasting impact on women’s incomes.
