Microfinance and Loan Officers’ Work Experiences: Perspectives from Zambia

Abstract

This article studies the challenges faced by microfinance institutions in Zambia, whose remit it is to provide financial services to the poor. It focuses on loan officers – the agents of delivery on the ground. With reference to loan officers’ experiences and words, the paper examines how gender and education shape and structure their day-to-day encounters. The study finds that different social spaces – ’the office’ and ‘the field’ – and wider context explains the gendered, culturally complex and multidimensional nature of developmental work at grassroots level. Social expectations emerge as major pressure points more for female loan officers than their male counterparts, making them less suitable for microfinance work, which has traditionally targeted poor women.

Acknowledgements

The author has benefited from insightful comments made by Linda Hitchin on the first draft. I am also grateful to the two anonymous referees of this journal for their extremely thoughtful and detailed comments that have improved the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Microfinance generally includes a range of financial services, including loans, savings deposits, insurance and money transfers provided to low income clients who lack formal financial access (Tomaselli et al., 2013). In this study we focus on provision of microcredit in a group-based lending methodology.

2. For this study, a total of 68 loan officers of 104 were studied: 74 per cent male and 26 per cent female, with most employed in their respective MFIs for two years or longer, a third for less than a year. Loan officers in some of the rural branches could not be reached with questionnaires due to time and financial constraints.

3. The interviewees consisted of eight females (five married and three single) and 12 males; their ages ranged from 21 to 35 years old. However, the average age for all the 68 loan officers who completed questionnaires was approximately 25. The work experience of the loan officers in both MFIs ranged from six months to five years with an average tenure of two years.

4. This category has seen an increase in graduate numbers in the last five years as a result of private universities’ participation in the provision of higher education.