Capability building combined with microcredit: the loan alone is insufficient

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the specific features of a social innovation aimed at assisting a social group, which is not simply marginalized, but also socially excluded at least for decades. It focuses on the activities of a non-profit corporation providing microcredit, mentoring and other social services to undereducated, unemployed and socially excluded Roma people in Hungary. The paper relies on the capability approach developed by Sen and Nussbaum. The main conclusion is that providing loans without capability building can lead to a mission drift towards less disadvantaged groups, and consequently the exclusion of the most disadvantaged may even increase.

KEYWORDS:

• Marginalization
• social innovation
• capabilities
• microcredit
• empowerment
• Roma minority

Acknowledgments

This article draws on work conducted for the CrESSI, Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation project that has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for Research, Technological Development and Demonstration (grant agreement no. 613261). Comments on earlier versions by Attila Havas, Rafael Ziegler and Enrica Chiappero-Martinetti, as well as the suggestions offered by the two anonymous referees of the manuscript are gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

The author was involved in devising the programme analysed in this paper, and he is still a voluntary member of the Kiútprogram Non-Profit Ltd. board.

Notes

1. Disclaimer: The author was involved in devising the programme analysed in this paper, and he is still a voluntary member of the Kiútprogram Non-Profit Ltd. board.

2. https://stateofthecampaign.org/2015/12/15/2015-report-number-of-clients-reached/

3. https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/laureates/2006/

4. The Hungarian name ‘Kiútprogram’ means ‘Way out programme’. The sound ‘ú’ is pronounced as ‘oo’ in the word ‘good’.

5. See the Estimates on Roma population in European Countries at the Roma and Travellers site of the Council of Europe: http://www.coe.int/en/web/portal/roma/ (accessed on 10 May 2017). At the 2011 census, only 309,000 people declared themselves being Roma as their first or second ethnic identity (the census allowed for double ethnic identity). People are usually reluctant to admit their association with a stigmatized minority in front of an official state organization.

6. Own calculation based on the 2011 census, http://www.ksh.hu/nepszamlalas/.

7. Poverty threshold: 60 % of the median of the equalized household income.

8. A synthetic work on microfinance is Armendáriz and Morduch (2010).

9. http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/en/policy/themes/social-inclusion/roma-pilot/

10. The management information system was financed by the EU Roma Inclusion project.

11. It would far exceed the scope of this study to give a review of the literature on life satisfaction, or happiness. On the connection between income and happiness, see e.g. Easterlin (2001). For the relationship between capabilities and happiness, see Anand, Hunter, and Smith (2005), Veenhoven (2010).

12. As it is usual in the estimation of subjective well-being, the logarithm of income is used (Layard, Mayraz, and Nickell 2008).

13. Subjective well-being is usually U-shaped during the life cycle, that is the subjective well-being of young and old is generally higher than that of middle-aged people (Blanchflower and Oswald 2008). Surprisingly, in our case it is ∩-shaped.

14. http://romafacts.uni-graz.at/index.php/history/prolonged-discrimination-struggle-for-human-rights/institutionalisation-and-emancipation

Additional information

Funding

Seventh Framework Programme [grant number 613261].