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Abstract
In 1993 the Sanduk, a French microcredit project that was explicitly modelled on the Bangladeshi Grameen Bank, was established on Ngazidja. Reasoning that in order to succeed the project would need to adapt to local conditions, the project operators drew up a blueprint for the project that was inspired by the Grameen Bank but attentive to the specific social and cultural context, thus merging Bangladeshi principles of social solidarity with a Ngazidja cultural context. The concept of social capital was invoked and oversight of the bank conferred upon customary authority figures, the assumption being that men who had acquired status in a ritual context would be able to exercise authority over the banks debtors. This proved not to be the case; many of the banks found themselves operating without effective control and were chronically dysfunctional. This paper looks at how the concept of social capital framed thinking within the project management, and suggests why this led to failure.
Acknowledgement
An early version of this article was presented at seminars in the anthropology departments at the University of Sydney and at Macquarie University in 1999 and 2002 respectively; it was extensively rewritten to be presented at the European Swahili Workshop held in Oxford in 2010. I wish to thank participants at all three events for their comments, and the usual anonymous referees. I would also like to thank Olivier Maes, former project manager of Sanduk, and others associated with Sanduk Ngazidja, for their assistance and for fruitful discussions.
Notes
1. World Bank, The Initiative on Defining, iii.
2. Cf. Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America's Declining”; Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse.
3. World Bank, “‘Social capital’”; World Bank, World Development Report; World Bank, The Initiative on Defining; World Bank, Overview: Social Capital.
4. Fischer, “Book Review,” 157.
5. The five were Gardner, “Keeping Connected”; Gebremedhin and Theron, “Locating Community Participation”; Godoy et al., “On the Measure of Income”; Petit, “Rethinking Internal Migrations”; Virtanen “The Urban Machinery”. This analysis, in ISI's Web of Science Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences citation indices, was the result of my quest for an anthropological grounding for this article, which was not as successful as I had hoped. Despite this absence from the anthropological sphere, the number of articles on “social capital” shows no signs of decreasing and had reached an annual total of 755 in 2011: “Social capital”, useful or not, is still very much on someone's agenda.
6. Fischer, “Book Review”, 157.
7. See Fine, “Social Capital: the World Bank's Fungible Friend”; Fine, “Social Capital”; Fine, Theories, for insistent criticism that nevertheless appears to fall on deaf ears.
8. See Portes, “Social Capital”, for the history of the term.
9. Bourdieu, Outline; Bourdieu, “Les Trois Etats”; Bourdieu, “Le Capital Social”, Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital.”
10. Bourdieu, “Les Trois Etats”; cf. Bourdieu, Outline.
11. Bourdieu, “Le Capital Social”, 2; emphasis in original.
12. Burt, Structural Holes, 9, cited in Woolcock, “Social Capital”, 189.
13. Loury, “The Economics of Discrimination”, 100, cited in Woolcock, “Social Capital”, 189.
14. Coleman, “‘Social capital’”, S98.
15. Narayan and Pritchett, “Cents and Sociability”, 872. The implication of this, of course, is that they may be measuring something else altogether: the man who lives in a palace and rides in a Rolls Royce may be the king, but he may also be the king's chauffeur.
16. For example, Van Bastelaer and Leathers, “Trust in lending”; Widner and Mundt, “Researching Social Capital”, for the former; Narayan and Pritchett, “Cents and Sociability”, for the latter.
17. For example, Narayan and Pritchett, “Cents and Sociability”.
18. Bourdieu, “Les Trois Etats”, 4; Bourdieu, Outline, 171–83.
19. Daley-Harris, State of the Microcredit Summit. The literature is compendious but see, for example, Basu et al., Microfinance in Africa; Bateman, Why Doesn't Microfinance Work?; Fernando, Microfinance; La Torre and Vento, Microfinance; Roy, Poverty Capital; Sengupta and Aubuchon, “The Microfinance Revolution”, for various perspectives and overviews.
20. Woolcock, “Learning from Failures.” See also Hossein, Credit for Alleviation; Khandker et al. Grameen Bank; Wahid, The Grameen Bank; Dyal-Chand, “Reflection in a Mirror”, Parmar, “Micro-credit”; Selinger, “Does Microcredit ‘Empower’?”.
21. See, for example, Goenka and Henley, Southeast Asia's Credit Revolution; Robinson, The Microfinance Revolution; Yaron, Successful Rural Finance Institutions.
22. Gibbons, The Grameen Reader.
23. Auwal, “Promoting microcapitalism”; Bhatt, “Delivering microfinance”; Hulme, “Can the Grameen Bank be Replicated?”; Hulme and Mosley, Finance Against Poverty; McDonnell, The Grameen Bank; Rahman, “The General Replicability”; Schreiner and Woller, “Microenterprise development programs”; Woller and Woodworth, “Microcredit as a Grass-Roots Policy”.
24. Bamfo, “A Grassroots Developmental Strategy”; Berhane et al., “Risk-matching Behavior”; Buckley, “Microfinance in Africa”; Copestake et al., “Assessing the Impact”; Hazarikaa and Sarangib, “Household access”; Hulme, “Can the Grameen Bank be Replicated?”; Masanjala, “Can the Grameen Bank be Replicated in Africa?”; Perry, “Microcredit and Women”; Snow and Buss, “Development”; Udry, “Credit Markets”, Zeller, “Determinants”.
25. Gentil and Lefèvre, Crédit Rural.
26. Until 1992 the Caisse Centrale de Coopération Économique (CCCE) and since 1998 the Agence Française de Développement (AFD); for the sake of consistency, it is referred to in this paper as the CFD.
27. In Shingazidja, sanduku, pl. masanduku. The word sanduku means chest or trunk.
28. Details of Sanduk philosophy and regulations from Gentil and Lefèvre, Crédit Rural; Kaiva, Projet Sanduk; Lefèvre, Projet Sanduk, various internal documents and Sanduk Itsandra association statutes. See also, Pierret “Entre Croissance et Crise”.
29. The functions of the aada are multiple and touch all spheres of life: it establishes and confirms alliances between clans, rights over land, membership of a community and relationships between individuals; it acts as a mechanism for the redistribution of wealth and effectively acts as a social security system for the older members of the community. However, the aada is also costly: the smallest socially acceptable aada in a rural area requires at least 2mF (€4000); in an urban area an aada of 25mF (€50000) is not exceptional. See Chouzour, Le Pouvoir de l”honneur, Walker, Becoming the Other.
30. Literally, “tradition and land”.
31. Initially called Sanduk Befuni, I refer to the bank as Sanduk Itsandra throughout for the sake of consistency.
32. A visit by the elders to a village is generally a ceremonial affair, both visiting and receiving elders dressing formally, the latter officially receiving the former in the public square or some other appropriate location. However, I recall one visit by the elders of the ntsi in connection with the Sanduk affair: they wandered around Itsandramdjini dressed in their finery, incensed that the elders of the town had completely ignored their visit and were nowhere to be found. They were forced to return home. This was a humiliating snub and it is indicative of the status of Itsandramdjini that it is perhaps the only town on the island that could have carried it off without risking further censure.
33. Walker, “What Came First.”
34. Mutuelles d’Épargne et de Crédit ya Komor (sic).