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Abstract
As Nobel Prize winner Amartya Sen has argued “[Bangladesh’s development achievements have] important lessons for other countries across the globe, [in particular a focus on] reducing gender inequality”. A major avenue through which this emphasis has been manifest lies, according to this narrative, in enhancements to women’s agency for instrumental and intrinsic reasons particularly through innovations in family planning and microfinance. The “Bangladesh paradox” of improved wellbeing despite low economic growth over the last four decades is claimed as a paradigmatic case of the spread of both modern family planning programmes and microfinance leading to women’s empowerment and fertility reduction. In this paper we show that the links between microfinance, empowerment and fertility reduction, are fraught with problems, and far from robust; hence the claimed causal links between microfinance and family planning via women’s empowerment needs to be further reconsidered.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Notes
1. The UN Population Award was given to General Ershad President of Bangladesh in 1987.
2. For a thorough going example of the narrative see the Lancet six-part series on Bangladesh in 2013, to which further references are provided in the text.
3. There is some discussion of men in the gender and development literature (for example Barker, Ricardo, & Mascimento, Citation2007 and similar sources; see also Cornwall, Edström, & Greig, Citation2011), but it is almost entirely from a mainstream feminist perspective (subsuming different feminisms). Arguing this (and the general conceptualisation of men in gender studies) is obviously beyond the scope of this paper. However, the neglect of men is transparently obvious in the sorts of data used here in the paucity of men as respondents in demographic, health and fertility surveys.
4. The former lauds the supply of contraception in Matlab in the 1970s while the latter the programmes of BRAC focusing on “ultra-poor” women.
5. As noted above, Amartya Sen has an article in this issue; the Bangladesh phenomenon and the roles of development organisations such as ICDDR,B and BRAC, feature prominently in the claims for public policy promoted by Sen and co-authors; see for example, Dreze and Sen (Citation2013). With the exception of Sir Fazle Abed, none of the authors of the papers in this issue acknowledge potential conflicts of interest.
6. We touch on the arguments advanced in the Lancet series but a fuller discussion would go beyond the concerns of this paper.
7. It should be noted that the qualitative literature on these microfinance, empowerment, and so on, is widely equally tainted by close activist researchers with vested interests in the official logics of these development agendas; again, demonstrating this would go beyond the scope of this paper and we mention it only to be even handed between research methods.
8. A related example of policy induced evidence is where the apparent failure of women found to be “empowered” in the 1990s were found to not have “empowered” daughters (Schuler et al., Citation2010; Schuler & Rottach, Citation2010), leading to a call for new ways to measure empowerment.
9. In other words, the indicator of the latent variable empowerment is justified because it is correlated with microfinance membership, and microfinance membership (or borrowing) is claimed to be empowering because it is associated with the latent variable which is validated because it is associated with microfinance membership!
10. Still births are reported in the WFS and BFS.
11. It is notable that all the Bangladesh Demographic and Health Surveys (1993–2011) were conducted by the same private consultancy firm, but still did not always use consistent questions and coding or include the same survey modules (for example partner questions).
12. Because microfinance institutions have different practices (at different times and locations), in particular whether the focus is exclusively on microfinance or also includes training and or empowerment activities, disaggregation by microfinance institution is a possibility. However, in reality, in the period covered by these data the distinction between microfinance only and microfinance and other supportive activities was not as clear sometimes as suggested.
13. Thus this literature is likely to suffer badly from false positives and confirmation bias where the particular index which fits the maintained hypothesis is reported and those which are less consistent are neglected (Camfield, Duvendack, & Palmer-Jones, Citation2014).
14. There may be a number of questions about participation in decision-making over different items of expenditure or other issues; the number and scope of these questions is also not standardised across surveys. Different items in this group have been divided into those which are in a sense about issues within the normal scope of female responsibility, and thus when answered in the affirmative may not reflect autonomy of decision-making, and those which are perhaps discretionary relating to a woman’s private interests (Basu & Koolwal, Citation2005).
15. Some questions about respondent’s (ever-married women) partners were answered by the respondent; others by the partner himself (all partners are male in these data).
16. There are many reasons to believe that answers from women and men to these types of questions may suffer badly from various response biases – diplomatic, normative, response set. For example, women may falsely cede decision-making to men out of deference, and men to women out of political correctness (Story & Burgard, Citation2012).
17. That is: tfr2 indepvars [iweight = weightvar], cluster(psuvar)
18. That is we specify: svyset psu [weight = weightvar]
svy: poisson
19. That is a coefficient of 1.02 (0.98) means 2 per cent more (fewer) births. “t-statistics” are positive (negative) for IRR coefficients greater than (less than) one.
20. Some of the questions have binary but others have polytomous responses; the former are coded 1 for the presumed “empowered” response, the latter are coded into an ordinal integer scale from 0 to highest. Thus for “decisions” the lowest value is where the respondent does not have a say or does not participate in the decision, next lowest where the final say or participation is joint, and the highest value is the respondent having the final say or decision-making alone. There is some doubt as to whether this is the appropriate ordering (Hsiao-Li, Citation2010), and indeed whether responses to such questions are not clouded by various response biases as mentioned above.
21. We classify a decision as joint when (1) both say joint, (2) either say jointly and husband says wife, (3) wife says wife and husband says jointly, (4) wife says husband and husband says wife. The main other category is where wife says husband and husband says husband or jointly. This classification may go some way to accommodating the response (and cognitive) biases mentioned in the text.
22. It has been argued elsewhere (Palmer-Jones, Citation1999) that there was a slowdown in the rate of growth of agriculture in the early-mid 1990s followed by a rise at the end of the decade and into the 2000s, as can be seen in .