Global Health Studies presents: Mara Kardas-Nelson

In 2005, pop star Bono proclaimed, “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Give a woman microcredit, she, her husband, her children and her extended family will eat for a lifetime.” By the mid-2000s, microfinance--small, high-priced loans, given mostly to poor women--had become the international development intervention of choice: A way to fix health care, unemployment, and gender equity. In 2006, when Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on microfinance, he proclaimed that tiny loans would “put poverty in museums.”

But years before Yunus founded the Grameen Bank, the organization most associated with microfinance, there were concerns that small, high-priced loans are as likely to bury poor people in debt as they are to pull them from poverty. As the program grew, borrowers from India to Kenya faced J*il time and forced land sales. Reportedly hundreds committed suicide. Many borrowers face less dramatic but just as life-changing consequences, with the stress of debt and repayment impacting relationships and their ability to provide for their family. Borrowers also face shame and social stigma that stems in part from failing to reach the emancipatory vision that Yunus helped to pitch: That with a loan, a person can change their life, and thus the world.

Mara Kardas-Nelson's book, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky, explores the rise and fall and quiet rise again of microfinance. It is told through the eyes of American policymakers who helped to promote anti-poverty lending, and two groups of Sierra Leonean women who have taken out loans. The book is rooted in experiences of these women, who have experienced neither the emancipation promised nor the worst consequences that many media outlets publicized. By discussing their stories, we’ll explore the decades-long ramifications of seemingly small policy choices that reverberate around the world, and the role of media in shaping our understanding of anti-poverty programs and the lives they touch. These narratives are set against the backdrop of the meteoric rise of microfinance, the context of which is essential to understanding the current dismantling of USAID.

Mara Kardas-Nelson is a journalist covering inequality, particularly regarding health, the environment, and economic development. She’s reported from across North America and Africa, and also spent years working in global health. She currently writes for The Boston Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team and teaches journalism at Boston College. Her 2024 debut, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky, was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize.

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