Gender mainstreaming and water development projects: analyzing unexpected enviro-social impacts in Bolivia,India, and Lesotho

Gender mainstreaming policies and programs, meant to be gender-sensitive or to target gender issues, are increasingly implemented by both governmental and non-governmental actors. However, these projects seem set to continually aim solely at women, despite more than a decade of work encouraging broader scope. Using recent case studies from Bolivia, Lesotho, and India, we address the tensions laden in three major questions about water, gender, and development: (1) Is mandatory inclusion of women in water governance and decision-making effective?, (2) Do water development projects provide equal benefits and burdens for women and men?, and (3) In what ways are water projects and their policies impacting and impacted by gendered enviro-social spaces? By providing triangulated data from ethnographic studies in three distinct local contexts, we are able to pinpoint major cross-cutting themes that serve to highlight and interrogate the gendered impacts of water development projects’ policies: public and private lives, women’s labor expectations, and managing participation. We find that gender mainstreaming endeavors continue to fall short in their aim to equitably include women in their programming and that geographic, environmental, and socio-cultural spaces are intimately related to how these equitability issues play out. We provide practical recommendations on how to address these issues.     

‘If You Fall,Stand Up Again’: The Moral Nature of Financial Literacy in the Global South

Over the past decade a range of development actors have begun to implement financial literacy training in low‐income countries. These programmes have become a key pillar of financial inclusion projects targeting the rural poor but, to date, they have received little scholarly attention. This article draws on ethnographic observation of two financial literacy programmes implemented by microfinance institutions in Cambodia to examine the current practices of financial education in the global South. The findings highlight that while financial literacy training purports to be a technical, skill‐building intervention aimed at enabling knowledge, its practices work primarily to impress upon borrowers moral lessons associated with creditworthiness, while also stressing individual responsibility for debt stress. In this way, it furthers the goals of financial providers, but fails to address the complex and real problems of debt stress. The authors suggest that financial literacy, at least where it is enacted by microfinance providers, is unlikely to moderate the problems of over‐indebtedness faced by rural borrowers.     

Borrowing Across Borders: Migration and Microcredit in Rural Cambodia

This article explores an unexpected and overlooked consequence of the expansion of microcredit: how it interacts with migration patterns. Drawing on qualitative research in northwest Cambodia, this study explores the uses, meanings and implications of ‘migra‐loans’ — microcredit loans that are used in tandem with household strategies of international migration. Using microcredit in combination with migration allows households to immediately meet consumption goals and utilize the credit being actively promoted by microfinance institutions, while also retreating from insecure and less profitable local livelihood strategies. These strategies problematize expectations about the developmental potential of microcredit, and highlight the importance of local context in framing rural livelihood choices.     

Contested mobilities: gendered migration pressures among Cambodian youth

This paper explores how gender norms and expectations shape the migration decision-making processes of Cambodian young people, in a community characterized by high levels of migration to Thailand. Based on qualitative fieldwork with migrant and nonmigrant youth, I examine how young people make sense of migration and its local alternatives, and highlight the various gendered pressures that young people, and particularly men, experience for migration. Given the lack of local life-making alternatives that neatly conform to hegemonic masculine ideals, young men experience strong pressures for migration and encounter negative social judgments where they seek to stay put. In contrast, young women experience less forceful migration pressures, perceive meaningful alternative life-making projects in the village, and feel more free to actively resist migration. More generally, my findings highlight the importance of interrogating gendered processes of migration not only in terms of how they affect women and those who choose to migrate but also with consideration to how they affect men, and those who choose – or would prefer – to stay home.