How far does neoliberalism go in Egypt? Gender, citizenship and the making of the ‘rural’ woman

ABSTRACT

This paper focuses on civil society in Egypt as a site in which the ‘Egyptian rural woman’ is made by looking at processes of microfinance which often ‘fail’ to realise their stated goals of ‘empowerment’, ‘poverty alleviation’ or ‘social mobility’. Using ethnographic material from a microfinance programme in the Egyptian governorate of al-Minya, such programmes are problematised beyond their stated goals. Instead, such initiatives put in place an infrastructure that links micro-borrowers to the market. Thus, what it means to be a ‘liberated’ woman in the Egyptian context is built on access, participation in and creation of ‘the market’.

RÉSUMÉ

Cet article étudie la société civile en Egypte comme un chantier dans lequel la « femme rurale égyptienne » se construit en examinant les processus de la micro finance qui souvent ne réussissent à réaliser leurs objectifs déclarés « d’émancipation », de « réduction de la pauvreté » ou de « mobilité sociale ». Utilisant un matériel ethnographique d’un programme de microfinance dans le gouvernorat égyptien de al-Minya, de tels programmes sont problématisés au-delà de leurs objectifs affichés. Plutôt, de telles initiatives mettent en place une infrastructure qui lie les micro-emprunteurs au marché. Par conséquent, ce qu’être une femme libérée signifie dans le contexte égyptien est fondé sur l’accès, la participation au « marché », ainsi que sur la création du « marché ».

KEYWORDS:

• Neoliberalism
• microfinance
• Egypt
• gender
• market
• civil society
• rural
• political economy

MOTS-CLÉS:

• Néolibéralisme
• microfinance
• Egypte
• genre
• marché
• société civile
• rural
• économie politique

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Karim Malak is a PhD candidate at the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. His previous work focuses on the history of accounting and capitalism and its link to the postcolonial subject in Egypt in the modern period.

Sara Salem is a Teaching and Research Fellow in the Politics and International Studies Department at the University of Warwick. Her research looks at questions of political economy, feminist and gender studies, postcolonialism, history, and Marxism in the particular context of the Middle East.

Notes

1. One way of demonstrating this is by looking at social funds around the world – 147 worth US $5.4 billion. In Egypt, the Social Fund for Development (SFD) has allocated US$2.5 billion to projects (Abou Ali et al. 2009, 1–3). Indeed by the 2000s, microfinance represented a growing global phenomenon, leading to the UN declaring 2005 the year of microfinance.

2. For one example where female borrowers in the San Francisco Bay Area are encouraged to practise their agency by taking out loans such that it is their individual responsibility to accrue revenue, rather than that of the combined unit of the family, a collective or community, as part of a microfinance poverty alleviation scheme that fails, see Moodie (2013).

3. It can easily be argued that this process of increasing bank capital and the money supply began with the 1970s ‘infitah’ policies of Anwar Sadat with the promulgation of law 120/1975, which allowed the Central Bank alone the authority to determine interest rates, and law 43/1974, when foreign capital was allowed an ownership stake in local banks The aim however is to locate such processes away from the state and focus instead on how such practices occur through microtechnologies with borrowers and creditors.

4. Mitchell reviews writings in the colonial period that sought ‘to isolate women as the locus of the country’s backwardness’ (1991, 113) – it is this type of dynamic we see repeated vis-à-vis rural-urban dynamics.

5. Field Office Director of philanthropy management NGO based in Cairo, personal communication, 2013.

6. Analogous to the discussion of microfinance, versus cooperatives and their potentiality of liberty, is Karl Marx’s discussion of how cooperatives themselves carry a communal aspect of organising, yet one that can also develop into a corporatist structure that is not accessible to all. See Marx’s discussion and critique of Lasalle’s proposals for cooperatives in Marx (Marx and Fernbach 1974).

7. For more on the conflict of the dissolution of a medical welfare NGO supported by endowments and how board members successfully challenged the executive branch’s decision to dissolve this organisation in the Egyptian courts system, see Al-ʿysawī (2011). For documentation of the dissolution of cooperatives and how members of the cooperative mobilised through sit-ins, see Abd al-Gawad (2014).

8. Project concept paper and project cost estimate submitted to foreign donor, 2012, in possession of authors.

9. Short-listed project proposal document submitted to foreign donor, 2012, in possession of authors.

10. The point about copyrighting one’s own consulting materials was raised when during the bidding process consultants were asked if they have their own educational material that is theirs and is not ‘pirated’.