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ABSTRACT
This article examines the role of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in promoting ‘financial inclusion’ in West Africa. The role of the ILO in microfinance and financial inclusion has often been overlooked, in contrast to the role played by the World Bank, G20 and like institutions. The ILO is significant here because it suggests a number of ambiguities and important political dynamics that have gone overlooked in previous critical discussions of microcredit, which have often focused on the politics of commercialisation, indebtedness and accumulation by dispossession. This article draws instead on Gramsci’s concepts of subalternity and organic crisis to suggest that the politics of ‘financial inclusion’ in practice are often shaped as much by the political dynamics engendered by the erosion of postcolonial order as by the imperatives of accumulation. The argument is illustrated empirically by examining ILO activities on microinsurance and ‘inclusive finance for workers’ in West Africa, with an emphasis on Senegal.
Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association. The author thanks conference participants, Malcolm Campbell-Verduyn, Stephen McBride, Robert O’Brien and Tony Porter, as well as the two anonymous reviewers from this journal, for their comments.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on the contributor
Nick Bernards is a PhD candidate in International Relations at McMaster University. His articles on the ILO have appeared in Global Labour Journal and Critical African Studies.
Notes
1 The following draws on the author’s discussions with MECSO officials in Dakar in November of 2014.
2 This is, of course, at best a rough guess at MECSO’s share of the ‘national’ market because the figures are for different sources and cover different years, but 2009 is the latest year for which national figures are available.