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International Expert Organizations and Policy Adoption

The World Bank and Microfinance in the 1990s

Northwestern University, USA, u-dalgic{at}northwestern.edu

Microfinance as a development policy tool has enjoyed an increasing popularity in the last few years. The United Nations declared 2005 as the international year of microcredit. Since Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, microfinance is once more under the spotlight. The prominence of development programs is mainly promoted by powerful international organizations like the World Bank. This article examines the World Bank's World Development Reports over time to demonstrate how the Bank became interested in, interpreted, and framed microfinance in accordance with its general background assumptions on poverty and development. The neoliberal interpretation by the Bank in the 1990s of notions such as social capital and gender is crucial for understanding its adoption of microfinance.

Key Words: development • gender • microfinance • social capital • World Bank

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