View article

The exclusion of the poor in developing countries requires radical enterprising solutions. Hence, microfinance was originally developed to intermediate through tailored double-bottom line initiatives, which would first supply more appropriate credit and, then other ‘financial services’, in an essentially participatory, ‘bottom-up’ way. This would support local, small-scale economic activity while enhancing well-being and social/gender justice. However, frontline local officers, originally recruited into microfinance institutions to help ‘empower’ the poor towards this end, have in practice been found to adopt unexpectedly different roles. Using original data from Zambia this article examines how this occurred in a frontier field situation. Here loan officers performed multiple, ambiguous and changeable roles while their home institution at first sought to decouple, and then prioritized its own immediate survival over their other …