Introduction
This piece focuses on critiquing microfinance as it begins to become mainstream among civil society, highlighting its role in performing the market. Microfinance has been framed as one of the most important tools to emerge within the development industry in the past few decades. Despite this, there has been a growing body of work that has looked at microfinance critically and posed important questions about the promises microfinance makes and the numerous ways in which it fails to deliver on these promises.1
Some critiques have gone even further: rather than engaging in the question of whether microfinance projects fail or succeed, they instead point to the ways in which microfinance creates new problems for the poor and marginalised – in other words, that it is productive of new relations of exploitation through ‘responsibilisation’2 (Moodie 2013). Taking Egypt as our context, we aim to engage with these emerging critiques as well as to pose new questions. The last two decades have seen the rapid proliferation of microfinance programmes and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Egypt. It is this proliferation and its effects that we intend to analyse, through raising critical questions about the infrastructure that microfinance projects contribute to.
Microfinance is often studied as though it is an isolated institution or process. We instead place it within the relations that form the labour market in Egypt in order to show the material impact microfinance is having on its structure, particularly in what are represented as ‘rural’ areas. This is key, for not only does microfinance fashion a singular subjectivity in these hinterland areas – represented as backwards and ‘rural’ – but the largest number of micro-borrowers in Egypt are located in the southernmost part that is called Upper Egypt, with 42.9% of ‘clients’ in 2010. Thus, to look at microfinance outside the capital of Cairo is not only important theoretically because it allows us to analyse market subjectivities in areas far from the centres of capital, but more importantly it allows us to analyse a case that represents the near majority of micro-borrowers (EFSA 2010). This must be contextualised vis-à-vis Egypt’s banking sector, which historically has had low penetration into society, with only a small percentage of the population having bank accounts. As of 2014, only 14% of all adults in the total population have a bank account and only 6% of adults have them in the poorest 40% of households (World Bank 2014).
In Egypt a significant percentage of households therefore exist that are ‘unbanked’. Microfinance attempts to remedy this situation and helps banks increase their capital (Elyachar 2005, 198) by ‘responsibilising’ some to begin to save, as part of their accounting of surplus revenue or profit, rather than living ‘hand to mouth’. Attempts to create a new economic subject who understands the ‘responsibility’ owed to their household and the need to save thus go hand in hand with attempts to increase the money supply of the state and number of ‘banked’ households, thereby in turn increasing total bank capital.3 In beginning to save money and plug these households to banks, an important market is created and debt is encouraged, the corollary of which is that to repay this debt all ‘products’ that were hitherto sold at a certain price have a markup to cover the cost of finance and banking. Thus, through microfinance and banks, a new subjectivity is born that is by necessity linked to an ethic of accumulation which so happens to help banks increase the percentage of ‘banked’ money and therefore the money supply.
Moreover, we make the argument that the ‘rural’ is critical to these developments, and that the infrastructure created through microfinance relies on an already established NGO machinery cultivated in Cairo that is not indigenous to Upper Egypt. Indeed, such a bias has been clear in the literature that focuses on social movements and the Arab uprisings, most of which relies on the construction of citizenship along specific axes that serve to exclude the ‘rural’ from notions of the modern (Abdelrahman 2015). In understanding the complexities of ‘rural’ citizenship, Ray Bush’s work is key. Bush has written extensively on the subject of rural Egypt primarily through looking at the connections between land ownership and how this is regulated through the state and the market. He has shown the ways in which the lack of access to land has meant that peasants have had to turn to wage labour in order to survive, demonstrating how capitalist penetration into the hinterland – through wage labour – changed the previous labour regime of land tenancy and farming (Bush 1999, 111). New forms of production bring with them different social relations. Additionally, agriculture was the first sector to be liberalised following Egypt’s transition to an open market economy after the hinterland was constructed as needing government intervention in order to become profitable. These processes have meant that ‘rural’ has been seen as backwards because of the lack of capital and state penetration, thus constituting a different form of citizenship. Gender plays into this in important ways. The historical tendency (Mitchell 1991, 112) to portray Egypt as backwards because of the lagging status of its women has been transformed in the contemporary moment into portraying the hinterland, now seen as the ‘rural’, as backwards partly because ‘rural’ women are not as educated or empowered as urban women.4 While there has been extensive research on the question of Egypt’s ‘rural’ political economy, the question of gendered citizenship has been under-researched, and thus forms the major framework for this paper. While much work has been done on the ways in which the construction of citizenship is a gendered process that reifies the male as the defining citizen and thus integrates patriarchy into notions of what it means to be a good and respectable citizen, less attention has been paid to how other social structures can be treated as constitutive of what it means to be a woman.
The aim of this intervention is not to speak for or against the narratives of the women themselves nor to trace women’s agency. Rather, the aim is to trace the infrastructure that is being created in ‘rural’ Egypt through microfinance projects, and in particular the ways in which this infrastructure relies on and reproduces certain gendered notions, creating opportunities for the agency to be funnelled into the creation of a market subjectivity that was previously not there. It is these gendered notions that we are interested in. Important work has been done on the ways in which gender is implicated in Egypt’s changing political economy, work that shows the close connections between market exploitation and gender relations (Ghannam 2013; Hoodfar 1997). This type of work has become even more necessary in post-2011 Egypt. This paper looks at how the notion of women’s economic empowerment came to play a role in building an infrastructure of the market in ‘rural’ Egypt.
Using the lens of the ‘rural’ raises a different set of questions with regard to microfinance. We use the concept of neoliberalism in this paper and define it as ‘a project of restoring capitalist class power by liberating capital from its post-war constraints through a program of marketization and privatization’ (Gill and Law 1989, 478). We ask: is a discussion of ‘neoliberalism’ a useful point of departure for spaces where capitalism has only meekly penetrated, such as the Egyptian hinterland? Indeed, to speak of microfinance in the hinterland – as a tool to implant the market within such localities – is to delineate and depict a very different process than an urban city where a form of the market functions daily and where much of the population has a bank account. Thus, rather than take neoliberalism, of which a key element is the ‘entrepreneurialisation’ of subjects who lack the means and often ‘finance’, as a point of departure and add qualifiers to its application in ‘rural’ Egypt, the task is inverted. Our aim is to take the hinterland as a point of departure and give it analytical primacy. Following this, our question is: what are the results of these attempts by civil society and in particular microfinance initiatives to create market linkages in the Egyptian hinterland through targeting women? Rather than adding multiple subcategories and markers of identity in order to show how they intersect with notions of ‘neoliberalism’ – implicitly treating each category that is to be entrepreneurialised differently, be they urban men, rural men, or urban women or rural women – this paper aims to ask what womanhood means in the hinterland by scrutinising the singular gendered dynamics it creates through the discourse of the ‘rural’.
It becomes analytically helpful to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, a geographically performed term, one that follows a civilisational hierarchy such as ‘rural’ and is assumed to be backwards and timeless, or one where a different political economy functions, and, on the other hand, the term ‘hinterland’ which denotes a space within the state that is not as close to capital as the centres. This means that the former can be unpacked for its representational politics and the latter can be used to detect how such spaces functioned before the penetration of microfinance capital, without necessarily treating them as ‘less developed’ or arguing that a market had not existed before. The aim is to show that there existed a process of economic organisation that differed. The term ‘rural’ is deployed throughout to show how NGO employees created an idea of a space outside an urban zone and the capital, and with it created a range of assumptions about its stage of ‘development’. Hinterland is deployed however to discuss a non-urban space without these assumptions. It becomes helpful to traffic in the representation of areas as underdeveloped or timeless, ‘rural’, to shore up legitimacy for these development schemes.
If prerequisites to neoliberalism such as techno-managerial discourse, security – the representation of a coercive body to secure the market – and market forces are lacking in the hinterland, how helpful is it to use neoliberalism to explore microfinance theoretically? Further, if microfinance so often fails to fulfil its stated goals of alleviating poverty and generating growth (Elyachar 2005), what happens when microfinance NGOs choose to work in the hinterland? The answer is that an infrastructure is assembled. It is because of this that we turn to infrastructure to probe the ‘rural’. After detailing this infrastructure, a look into the world of NGOs and their discourse of ‘empowerment’ of women explains how this process of linking NGOs to ‘rural’ localities occurred. To convince these women to take out loans and be ‘successful’ entrepreneurs, they must first be designated as undeveloped and yet-to-be-liberated. Lastly, to show that one of the effects of microfinance is the assembling of an infrastructure, it becomes necessary to probe the labour market that these NGOs create, a factor that is not in the current discussion in the critique of microfinance. Using fieldwork at a village in Upper Egypt’s governorate of al-Minya in 2013, we argue that NGOs are not solely interested in microfinance and that in the process women are disciplined in a way to create the market through defining what it means to be a ‘developed’ woman.
Making al-Minya’s economy
The governorate of al-Minya is interesting not only for being the centre of commerce in Upper Egypt, where historically several large landholding families have lived, but also for the several farming estates that now belong to large corporations, as well as its colonial history of missionary activity. Moreover, its schools, its university and its orphanages have an interesting history that means wage labour represents significant numbers of the population. More tied to the case at hand is al-Minya’s uniqueness for having several enclaves of revenue generation that have resisted commodification as well as proletarianisation. The village of jabal al-tir (the bird’s mount) is a pilgrimage site for a church in the mountain in which the Holy Family allegedly sought refuge from King Herod after the birth of Christ. Christian villagers await the annual festival where, according to them, several hundred thousand Christians come and stay to witness the mulid al-ʿdhraʾ (the festival of the Virgin Mary). This historic pilgrimage provides subsistence to the villagers who rent their homes and provide food, water and often entertainment. This historic form of subsistence is a different way to generate revenue rather than surplus value, resulting in a different subjectivity to the market, one that is not based on wage labour and subsequently proletarianisation. Next to jabal al-tir and inside the village of samalut is the contrast of the monstrous, polluting, cement factory of the Helwan Cement Company, a once publicly owned company which was privatised in 2001. On 9 December 2004 private equity firm Citadel Capital, now called Qalaa Holdings, purchased it and later sold it to its current owner in August 2005, the Italian multinational Italcementi Group. The Helwan Cement Company manufactures internationally competitive Portland Cement, often termed (white) limestone cement which naturally occurs in Upper Egypt and especially al-Minya.
It is against these developments aiming to proletarianise and generate revenue from al-Minya that the microfinance project under administration was presented as an intricate and ‘advanced’ development project. It involved a foreign donor and an intermediary philanthropy NGO based in Cairo that was designated as the ‘manager’ in order to lower the ‘risk’ factors associated with the project. This leaves all but the actual NGO in al-Minya that was tasked with executing the project to the surrounding rural villages. Indeed it seems odd to mention it last, but that is how the NGO figured in the discussion over the project in al-Minya in the consortium between the Cairene management NGO and the foreign donor. Fieldwork thus involved not just field visits to al-Minya that included observing the project and auditing it, but from the outset it involved observing often-fraught interventions in the bidding process for funding from the foreign donors as well as the hiring of consultant experts for the project. This ethnographic lens, executed through participatory observation, narrates the microfinance intervention and allowed the capture of these moments of decision-making. It is these moments that make up the theoretical argument of this paper that microfinance is a method of operation of politics by other means. Tracing this long process of funding donor-driven agendas that begin before the project of microfinance even starts, we present evidence to show how microfinance lays an infrastructure for the free market.
Assembling an infrastructure
Islah Jad has written about ‘NGO-ization’, a process in the Arab world whereby
issues of collective concern are transformed into projects in isolation from the general context in which they are applied and without taking due consideration of the economic, social and political factors affecting them. NGO-ization has a cultural dimension, spreading values that favour dependency, lack of self-reliance and new modes of consumption. (Jad 2007, 177)
The linkage to an NGO infrastructure that is based in Cairo is so pervasive that it is not unheard of to introduce urban-based trainers from Cairo with the phrase ‘this is Mr X from Cairo’, in an effort to impress upon participants of microfinance and development projects the weight and status of the trainer. In follow-up sessions with the micro-lenders women are frequently reminded how much Consultant X cost and that they have come all the way from Cairo. During the bidding process for the execution of the microfinance projects, consultants submitted several proposals. It was observed that hiring consultants to execute developmental projects that do workshops or training to procure a certain skill set to ‘liberate’ these women almost always translated into bids by urban-based Cairene ‘experts’. Thus, even locals who enter the consultant development market are at a disadvantage despite the promises of civil society as an open space of free competition. To reconcile this paradox, local ‘rural’ experts are relegated as part of a different and ‘backwards’ civil society. In other words, civil society is an arena of free exchange and free competition, and yet it just so happens that these rural members of civil society are at a disadvantage just because of where they are from. A look at how that occurs shows a peculiar force at play that builds on the representation of the ‘rural’ as backwards.
In al-Minya, the local microfinance NGO that received a British grant had no say in the hiring of a consultant to execute the project. Instead the philanthropy management NGO in Cairo was the one running the project. The Cairo NGO initially found it too ‘risky’ to hire a local female consultant from al-Minya, even if, ironically, the project was about empowerment of women through microfinance. This is an important point that shows the hierarchies within feminism: whilst the goal is to empower these rural women, the Cairo NGO would not practise what it preached in placing its trust in a ‘rural’ female home-grown consultant. Although it would eventually hire that female consultant, it would only do so after several fraught internal discussions. This selection process demonstrates a number of insights into the world of civil society and its effects. To begin with, the local female consultant’s proposal amounted to half of what the Cairene male expert and his team asked for. The Cairo NGO, however, was willing to spend more resources on the male Cairene expert only because of his proposal’s details. Among these details was the Cairene male consultant’s ability to write workshop reports that would be sent to the donor as well as his command of English. In fact, during negotiations with the Cairene male consultant he was told that his rate was too high yet that ‘knowing the market he would never do himself the disservice’5 of lowering his hourly rate.
This curious detail meant that the whole project – the amount of days to give workshops and teach ‘empowerment’ skills to these women – would be cut while the consultant’s rate would remain untouched. In fact, in the several rounds of follow-up interviews with the male consultant, both sides expressed their ability and willingness to ‘adjust the project proposal’ – read: slash the number of consultancy days – to match the grant amount. The female consultant on the other hand would deliver more days of training and workshops because of her lower rate. Why was the Cairo-based consultant not willing to lower his rate? The answer lies in precisely understanding how these NGOs far away from Cairo rely on these experts and in the process link themselves to the donor-based infrastructure. Often what happens in the development project is not as important, or at most just as important, as the donor report.
Part of any consultant’s proposal in answering a Call For Proposals (CFP) and the Terms of Reference of a consultancy are references for previous projects. Among the due diligence of the NGO that issued the CFP is checking what his/her previous rate was. Thus, this market ‘rate’ becomes the value of the consultant – completely irrespective of the type of project. The NGO that issued the CFP is investing money not only in the consultant’s name but his marketability regardless of what ‘skills’ he possesses. For to undercut a consultant’s hourly rate would automatically mean they have a track record that was cheaper, locking them into less valuable consultancies perpetually. This means that a consultant’s rate can only go up, not down.
This type of ‘experience’ that the male Cairene consultant had is what is counted, yet home-grown rural ‘experience’ is met with extreme scepticism and often hostility. This demonstrates that such NGOs are disciplined into working within a market that does not condone its ideological premise of free-market competition. This shows that the techno-managerial definition of risk is predicated on ‘rural’ factors and marketability, not on substantive grounds and sustainability of resources. It did not matter at all that the female local consultant from al-Minya could identify with the women she was later to work with because she is from the same locality. What mattered was that this local NGO in rural al-Minya could tap into an experienced Cairene, or so the management NGO in Cairo justified in its initial preference for the expensive male Cairene consultant. To understand this hostility to the ‘rural’, a look at the discourse of ‘empowerment’ and the mechanism of incorporation of women into microfinance is required. While indeed the female consultant was in the end selected, and this could be termed as an instance of the operation of the free market, this would be a mistaken conclusion. If anything, the details and arguments presented thus far should make it clear that the sheer amount of work and discussion to make such a decision, for a ‘rural’ female consultant who is more affordable and aware of the problems of rural women in al-Minya, proves that the market is not a self-regulating force of free competition.
NGOs and the liberty of the market
The argument for this specific case goes like this: microfinance liberates women by allowing them to become entrepreneurs and self-dependent. The specific NGO infrastructure aims to ‘help’ rural women, in ways in which individualism is heralded as a positive character trait. These themes are part and parcel of the creation of the market through NGOs, and each in turn emphasises specific notions of subjectivity that are imposed on rural women in an attempt to create modern subjects that rely on the market. Yet if the drive to ‘liberate’ these women and alleviate poverty is such a fraught and often unsuccessful task – even if development standards are lowered – what is it then that these projects accomplish? This is what this paper seeks to ask by probing the infrastructure that is assembled for such developmental tasks. Indeed we want to point out that it is not merely a question of the success or failure of microfinance projects, as this would imply that microfinance could somehow be reformed to ‘work better’ or fail less. While it is true that the frequent failures of microfinance projects point to a disparaging reality – the failure of micro-borrowers to escape ‘poverty’ – it is also true that the impact of microfinance on forming subjectivities goes beyond its failure or success; even if it fails according to the goal of poverty alleviation, it succeeds in the goal of attempting to create a new gendered subjectivity. The point is to look at its effects and thus go beyond the question of failure versus success.
An analysis of the Egyptian context in particular reveals the ways in which NGO-isation has contributed to the discourse of the rural as backwards. By using specific paradigms of development that are tied to ideas of ‘liberating’ women from tradition, ‘rural’ women are relegated as backwards to what becomes termed ‘urban’ women. Civil society thus continues to not only exclude ‘rural’ Egyptian women from modern citizenship, but also serves to erase its own role in perpetuating specific relations and structures that maintain the economic, political and social imbalance between the ‘rural’ and the ‘urban’. For example, the role numerous civil society actors have played in framing women’s issues as a question of ‘personal liberty’ demonstrates the clear liberal underpinning of many gender-focused approaches, and becomes especially clear through grants and funding. Here it is useful to look at a few examples of the specific wording in grants that are allocated to projects for women in Egypt. The World Bank recently announced a loan to Egypt of US$300 million, part of which is to be given to ‘marginalised women’ as a form of microfinance that is to strengthen the private sector; microfinance to be understood as a means of individualising the economic burden on women (‘World Bank Loans Egypt’ 2014). Also, USAID has often approached gender through liberal assumptions, with a strong focus on political and economic participation at the level of the individual, whereby active citizenship is defined vis-à-vis proximity to the market (USAID 2015). What these examples show is that notions of gender empowerment rely extensively on individualistic and market-based solutions. But what shape does this type of ‘participation’ and empowerment through employment take? A quick answer would seem to show that employment and ‘personal liberty’ begin where the communal ends. To probe this further we turn first to the projects that donors fund, then those that seem to be coming under attack.
Employment has long played a central role in understandings of women’s empowerment, a legacy that can be traced back to Eurocentric theories of feminism that saw a woman’s right to work as central to gender equality. One need only look at attempts to transplant Eurocentric feminist ideals to the setting of rural women in Egypt to understand the debate within the field of feminism over the dominance of liberal feminism and the ‘Othering’ of non-white women (Mohanty 1988). In particular, employment was seen as a necessary prerequisite of liberation. This assumption continues to structure gender programmes and projects across the world (Kabeer 1995). This becomes especially clear when one looks at civil society and the ways in which access to employment is framed as central to development in Egypt. Yet it is unclear why cooperatives,6 for example, are not seen as a source of ‘liberty’ judging by the fact that little or no funding or projects exist for organising cooperatives – is it because they have a social ontology? Cooperatives serve as a useful example that shows not only how framing gender equality in terms of liberty, rather than justice, promotes a Eurocentric vision, but also how the attacks on cooperatives are part and parcel of attempts by NGOs to create a market in the Egyptian hinterland. Indeed, ‘liberty’ differs from ‘justice’ in that the former is individualistic and the latter is communal. The effects of the epistemological and actual assault on cooperatives serve to create a vacuum within which a market infrastructure can be put in place. Further below we address the displacement of cooperatives by NGOs in detail.
These attempts to create a market can be observed in how development projects in rural localities must have a revenue-generating arm: these programmes must be ‘good for business’. For example, a Call for Proposals by the British Conflict Prevention Program (CPP) in Egypt that tackles violence against women and promotes women’s rights emphasised that proposals need to ‘constitute good value for money’ (UK Embassy in Egypt 2014). Here we see a particular logic at work, that of valorising women’s rights according to particular assumptions – after all, what constitutes ‘value’ here? It is likely that it refers to particular ways of addressing the question of violence against women. The point is to focus on not these assumptions, but rather the language used – we will address women’s rights initiatives that are monetarily valuable – that of the market. More examples will be provided in the following paragraphs, demonstrating a framing whereby ‘rural’ women need to begin ‘making money’ in order to be seen as worthy citizens. The key takeaway term from the British CCP is ‘making money’, for to have said the word ‘profit’ would have been to violate Egypt’s NGO law number 84/2002. Thus, to some extent the legal framework in Egypt serves as an obstacle to this form of market linkage and accumulation (Malak 2015). Despite this, the premise of liberating women through enterprise still holds, but what type of enterprise are donors really after?
An infrastructure for the market: labour and employment
Employment tends to be presented as divorced from broader societal structures and is often represented as simply a question of creating jobs through market-led processes that are assumed to be natural. Lending capital to women functions as a means of empowering them, according to this narrative, as it exploits feminine traits in order to draw entire families out of poverty. Numerous projects in Egypt aim to expand women’s employment in order to support women’s rights. A prominent recent example is Sweden’s interest in promoting entrepreneurship for women in Egypt. One planned initiative aims to create over 500,000 jobs for Egyptian women. A Swedish official was quoted as saying: ‘The initiative aims to strengthen the participation of women in politics and business, reduce genital mutilation and sexual harassment’ (Aggour 2014). There is therefore a connection being made between ending social problems such as sexual harassment and genital mutilation and women entering the labour market. The Swedish ambassador to Egypt then connects this to Egypt democratising. The proposal goes on to emphasise that the project will help Egyptian women at an individual level. Yet there are larger forces at play. These market forces, because they are a priori defined as penetrating an area where the market has not fully surfaced (yet), become subsidised. Thus, the ‘rural’ becomes a subsidising force to foreign development capital that is seen as benevolent. Numerous projects focus on ‘financial planning’ and ‘money management’ among Egyptians in Upper Egypt, especially women. These entail the teaching of market technologies such as accounting. These projects are often presented as being an ‘investment in women’, the return of which it is assumed will be employment or the decision to be a micro-borrower. The project does this by linking people in need to financial institutions such as micro-lenders, showing clearly how a market infrastructure is being created.
An important question to ask here is who benefits from the introduction of more Egyptian women into the labour force. While Egyptian women are represented as the main (and only) benefactors, it is clear that certain national and transnational actors also benefit. Adam Hanieh has pointed out that poor women in Egypt have been drafted into textile factories to work at extremely low wages so that Egypt could compete with other countries that provide cheap labour (2014, 78). Samir Amin and Ali el Kenz have asked a similar question about who benefits with regards to the Euro-Mediterranean partnership programme initiated in 2005, pointing out that incorporating more Egyptians into a volatile and badly paid job market is beneficial to European markets above all (2005, 72).
A clear example of this logic at work is when the governor of Beni Suef, a largely rural governorate, was recently commended by the National Council of Women in Egypt (a government body in Egypt that is entrusted with supporting women) for ‘[approving] 30,000 EGP as investment fees [emphasis added] for the purchase of Identification cards (IDs) for 2,000 poor women’. The choice of words, while reflective of the form of urban citizenship espoused by the state, is deeply problematic in that it is seen as an ‘investment’ despite it being a grant. But this is indeed reflective since it would ‘give these women an identity’ (Salama 2014). Women without an ID card cannot take out a loan, activate inheritance wills or receive access to medical care, state welfare or welfare in general. In fact, they cannot gain access to state pensions, apply for loans for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) or participate in the market. More importantly perhaps is another level of politics detailing why these women cannot take out micro-loans. Defaulting micro-borrowers are often criminalised by having them sign IOUs in the equivalent of the amount they took out. Should a woman default and continue to do so despite the micro-lender’s attempts to have her repay, this IOU is sent to the police station whereby she receives an immediate arrest warrant. Without an ID card this last procedure would not be possible. To understand how widespread and pervasive this phenomenon is, one need only look at how many prime-time TV commercials during the holy month of Ramadan call for donations to micro-lending NGOs that now specialise in paying off these defaulting women’s debts to get them ‘back to the market’.
Thus, without an ID card, such women are identity-less in the eyes of the state inasmuch as they are not part of the market and they do not have a disciplining mechanism should they default. This is because, following failure to pay back a loan, it is difficult for police to locate an individual that lacks identification papers, fingerprints and an address on file. In this regard, microfinance NGOs seem to be carrying out a process normally carried out by the police, that of documenting and disciplining the rural population by encouraging them to have identification papers. There remain five and a half million women at the state level who are without national IDs (el-Sheikh 2014) and who are thus outside of the market. These women are considered not to be citizens; it is precisely their lack of participation in the market that constructs them as existing outside of citizenship.
Another example where this form of individualism is pursued to perform a market is the previously discussed factor of hiring ‘facilitators’ who act as informants at the village level. These facilitators monitor the micro-borrowers and write evaluation reports on each individual. While there is an argument to be made when it comes to this level of surveillance that is needed to guarantee that these individuals become disciplined members of civil society and the market, there is another peculiar force at play. During the skills exchange sessions and peer-to-peer sessions where successful micro-borrowers were brought to teach future and prospective micro-borrowers, a different and unanticipated discussion took place. Facilitators would cross-examine the micro-borrowers to make sure that when any of the women complained, they would not do so to ‘cheat’ the NGO’s guidelines.
Several of the micro-borrowers began to talk about how they would like to be these facilitators and receive salaries for their job. Indeed, after a few of the micro-borrowers ‘graduated’ from the empowerment and microfinance programmes, they looked forward to being rewarded by being facilitators. Citing the prestige that came with being an informant for the NGO, these women knew that this was the shortest route to ‘real’ empowerment, not that of the free market, taking out a loan and running a business. To be a ‘facilitator’ however required that new villages be put on the map where this NGO had not yet operated. Thus, the act of bringing these NGOs into the fold, and incorporating them into the market, translated into job opportunities and was in fact the quickest way to incorporate these women into the labour market. It was a win–win situation for all but the micro-borrowers: on the one hand, women could become wage-earners by being informants, which meant that more women would take out micro-loans and the NGO's microfinance portfolio would grow; but on the other hand, the long-term structural effect was to draw these women into the market, a move we problematise throughout this paper. To match the ‘demand’ for new micro-loans, which, as the previous section showed, was created by virtue of placing a ‘facilitator’ in each village to market the microfinance project, the microfinance NGO began to change the way it channelled its funds. Instead of having several loan cycles for an individual, it halved the amount in order to have a wider borrower base and keep up with this newfound ‘demand’.
The issue of time represents another mechanism through which microfinance necessarily changes in order to fashion market subjectivity. Bussing in women from different villages to be part of NGO activities often does not seem to be of concern to programme officers at these NGOs, despite severely affecting the women in question. This positioning fails to grasp village realities that women face that are wholly different from those in city areas. Transport may appear to be a simple question, but this elides the whole range of interactions these women must deal with when they enter the world of SMEs, from being audited by micro-lenders to participating in ‘empowerment trainings’. All of these disrupt their lives because they must allocate time and effort to transport and attending such activities.
Such hierarchies between the urban and the ‘rural’ – between Cairo’s NGO infrastructure and the parts of ‘rural’ Egypt yet to be fully brought into the market – can, from an analytical point of view, serve as the thread this article follows to trace the penetration of capitalism in the case of Egypt. Cairo-based NGOs lush with donor money scout for improvised areas and local NGOs that reside in the urban capitals of rural governorates. These NGOs in turn become a focal point and module in the dispersion of expertise and funds to the very depths of rural villages where no labour market exists in the sense of proletarianised labour. In the process, however, two things happen: first, an infrastructure that mirrors this hierarchy is laid out; and second, more importantly, rural women are disciplined and serialised to a new form of time-keeping. Akin to factory workers clocking in and out of their 10-hour shifts, these women are taught that time is literally money, a necessity for them to be able to run successful micro-enterprises. Trainer consultants in the project kept emphasising how time lost cannot be retrieved and impacts productivity. Thus, the more women are disciplined to keep time, the more potential micro-borrowers, the larger the microfinance portfolio the NGO holds and finally the more jobs for these women as facilitators who sell these loans. Whilst after the financial crash of 2008 some have demonised Wall Street hedge fund managers as instances of parasitic capitalism, these facilitators and micro-lenders do not seem to be that much different when it comes to creating demand for something that previously did not exist. In the process, however – barring all claims to practising ‘advocacy’, microfinance, SME and ‘empowerment’ programmes – an infrastructure of the market is performed.
Cooperatives versus individuals
In contrast to NGO market-based initiatives, cooperatives are structures where inputs such as finance, land or means of production (capital in the form of sewing machines, for example) are pooled and owned collectively. Each cooperative issues stock that reflects how much each individual contributed. The cooperative then forms a board that discusses how these pooled resources will be used to generate revenue and how that revenue will be spent. Indeed within civil society itself, there is a clear distinction in terms of the visibility of urban NGOs in relation to ‘rural’ ones. The dissolution of both NGOs and cooperatives in rural areas has been an ongoing problem,7 despite the continued resistance to these state decisions. Cooperatives continue to be under significant attack. Importantly, as more of them are dissolved one begins to see the proliferation of microfinance unabated.
Cooperatives, unlike NGOs and microfinance donors, work without a profit margin and without the incorporation of supply and demand mechanisms, instead cooperatives in theory function at financing at cost or marginally above cost with minimal or no ethic of surplus accumulation. In Upper Egypt cooperatives help farmers by buying fertiliser and seeds in bulk and selling produce; ownership of the inputs is communal and not individualistic. Yet this example is purposefully elided and not part of advocacy campaigns. NGO success stories always focus on women who saved up or took the ‘risk’ to take a loan, purchase inputs necessarily to run a business and the successful selling of those goods. The last part – the selling of goods – should not be underestimated for this is how the market is performed, more often than not. More often than not in ‘rural’ localities where there is no market for commodity goods sold at surplus rather than communal subsistence goods sold at or marginally above use value, NGOs blame microenterprise failure for the immaturity of the market. Yet this should come as no surprise for said ‘rural’ localities are not consumption-based areas – and even where there are more well-off rural dwellers, supply to those families comes from urban areas or Cairo. Thus, we see how a discourse is performed that displaces ‘villages’ with ‘rural’ localities whereby ‘the rural’ is held up as the antinomy or the backwards version of the ‘urban’. It is ultimately not clear how both are mutually exclusive from one another but the contrast is helpful as a discipline mechanism. This is not unlike the colonially created discourse of modernisation and ‘development’. Such ideas held that women who did manual demeaning labour were a reflection of less ‘developed’ societies (Cuno 2015, 5, 107). The focus on the education of women within this discourse also led to (uneducated) women in the hinterland being chastised for being unable to raise their children as well as (educated) women in urban cities. Uneducated women had not always been synonymous with ignorance and bad childrearing. It was only with the emergence of the modernisation thesis, which created and represented ‘rural’ women as ignorant, that this distinction of educated women in the cities and uneducated women in the countryside (and parts of the cities) emerged. This distinction was delineated by the discourse of the urban/rural. Similarly, Cuno (2015, 67) has also documented how ‘ruralisation’ showed that joint households, as opposed to the nuclear family or conjugal family, were represented as a phenomenon that was ‘rural’ before its disappearance from cities in Egypt in the twentieth century.
Returning to microfinance, we see how its representation of the ‘rural’ as areas where there exist no consumption patterns, markets of supply and demand of products and the generation of surplus value are built on previous characterisations of the rural as backwards and not-modern. This is because the consumption pattern in these ‘rural’ localities is one that is subsistence based, making it easier for cooperatives to operate because of the fact they have no profit margin; they thus have a different subjectivity to capitalism, the main tenet of which is surplus value generation and accumulation. By contrast, women who take out microfinance loans must market themselves enormously to prove the quality of their goods and by association create competition. Indeed, foreign donors now often welcome and suggest the addition of a documentary film to be made that markets the transformation of the lives of micro-borrowing women after their ‘successful’ management of their micro-enterprise. Interestingly, the cost of the fee the director receives, often a secret that only the Cairo-based philanthropy NGO knows, amounts to double the amount each woman receives as a loan in each cycle per year. The total cost of the production and publication – referred to as ‘communication’ – of the movie, including facilitators’ fees and updating the website of the NGO to include it, amounts to the equivalent of more than six individual loan cycles.8
Understandably, a successful woman who sells her vegetables or clothes she sews becomes the object of envy and jealousy. This is a trait that most NGOs disapprove of and teach in their workshops as emanating from a ‘backwards rural culture’. Yet these women on some level become linkages to a market where the marketing of goods changes their daily life and consumes more time. Interestingly, this aspect of time appears in the proposal document of an NGO as the following under the heading of ‘risk’: ‘The poverty of women heads of households prevents them from regularly and actively participating in women’s groups’. To mitigate this ‘medium’ risk, the proposal being presented to the foreign donor states:
Risk will be monitored by [name of recipient NGOs omitted] … loan officers, with their strong ties to the community, will be able to assess each [beneficiary’s social and marital category omitted] from the outset and provide necessary support as required, connecting her to other [social and marital category of woman omitted] working in similar vocations, and working with [other] communities to ensure that further reinforcement is provided where needed.9
But what was it that actually happened on the ground? To begin with, the ability of the recipient NGO to have such close ties with each community was due to the hiring of a community member as a ‘facilitator’; this individual acts as an informant and evaluator, seeing if the beneficiaries spend time in their micro-enterprise or not and subsequently if they are worthy of the funds. Second, it is important to note the issue of time is present but given another name: it is not because these activities are time-consuming that they prevent the beneficiary from ‘actively participating’ in the NGO activities, rather it is poverty that is the problem. There is no qualification or causal mechanism detailing how poverty would prevent someone from participating; it is treated as a bona fide inhibiting mechanism. More importantly for us to note is that if more villages enter the fold of the microfinance NGO, then more community members can be hired as informants with attractive incomes; thus, the project lays out an infrastructure that is lucrative. Rather than view these projects’ success as hinging only on the alleviation of poverty, for a majority of the beneficiaries this is seen as part of social mobility and a way to gain a job in the prestigious NGO. Moreover, these microenterprise goods sold at a profit eat away household budgets that are normally spent on subsistence, food and medicine. Cooperatives, in contrast, are not demonised by the community because they do not force members to take up time in marketing their goods. This is because cooperatives are trusted by the community, precisely because they are from the community. This trust is also reflected in the at-cost or marginally above-cost pricing rather than the creation of a profit margin.
If the problem of rural women is framed such that these women are not ‘liberated’ and microfinance liberates them, then why is there the glaring omission of cooperatives as a mechanism of ‘liberation’? The microfinance programme in question not only sought to tackle the issue of employment of women, but at the request of the foreign donor an ‘advocacy’ component was added so that the market gains of these women – read: accumulation of capital – be utilised and have social returns. If these ‘rural’ women lack resources necessary for the betterment of their lives and ‘emancipation’, why must they liberate themselves by accruing profit rather than a communal structure such as cooperatives? Liberty thus seems to be synonymous with marketisation of life and accruement of profit, specifically a form of primitive accumulation that is individualised seems to be the ‘liberation’ that donors pursue, not a communal at-cost form of revenue accruement. Thus, an infrastructure of a market is laid out owing to the pursuing of a market agenda where each individual has cash savings and eventually a bank account rather than stocks in a cooperative. Who is it exactly that pushes for this discourse of ‘emancipation’ and what are its effects?
A question begs itself: if ‘rural’ localities are disconnected from the market, will commodities not be sold at a discount to overcome this obstacle? Thus, an exploitive model is created as opposed to cooperative-based forces that follow a subsistence and village-to-village linkage. Another example where a market linkage occurs is during logical framework audits (known in development circles colloquially as log frames). This involves the serialisation of a project into several small tasks that the recipient NGO should undertake in exchange for the grant it is receiving. Yet this grant often comes with several caveats in the form of ‘adherence to good practices’ set by donor agencies. Key amongst those provisions – and often hidden in donor contracts – is the adherence to copyright laws. It becomes extremely odd when this – a non-issue in the majority of Egypt, much less the hinterland – surfaces and bears extra cost for the NGO operating in rural al-Minya. For example, in the development of project curricula and material for grassroots advocacy campaigns, which now are attached to microfinance projects so that market gains are translated into political participation and subsequently ‘liberty’, most NGOs print visual material and often utilise the material of others in the form of pictures and diagrams. The drive for commercialisation of such illustrative material becomes a profitable enterprise and a way to market individual consultants, making them more attractive during the bidding process for development projects. If each consultant is in legal possession of copyrighted material that can be used as a curriculum, then their chances of landing a project bid increase. This happens even as most of these city consultants fail to cater to the micro-borrowers and development ‘customers’ in the hinterland. One can see how that is the case when development consultants provided samples of their educational curriculum for a microfinance and empowerment project that featured print material, only to fail to notice that illiteracy is not uncommon in the hinterland.
The decision to censor the production of such material for copyright purposes, where intellectual property rights do not exist, becomes an added ‘cost’ borne by the grant recipient NGO. Not only that but it performs the key function of creating a market for such goods – development curricula – which would have otherwise existed as a common (but not free) good. In this process an individualistic, rather than communal, subjectivity is performed where each development worker’s material becomes a good that can be sold. In most cases when donor NGOs discover the mass production of certain material that may or not be copyrighted, the result is extreme anxiety and often a negative remark is placed in the audit of the NGO. The material need not be successfully proven to have been copyright but the automatic preference for such copyrighted and by association costly material demonstrates that the curricula are immaterial to the issue at hand; the point is that it is about creating a market for such development curricula through intellectual property rights.
The result is that consultants who execute these donor projects have begun to copyright their own material and present it as an added-value asset during the bidding process of these development projects.10 More importantly, one can see a market for development goods, and materials developing in the near future. The more foreign-funded NGOs that operate in these areas, the more the requirement for copyrighted material. This can eventually translate into profitable enterprises that supply such materials. Thus, the effects of ‘emancipating’ women through microfinance happen to involve the marketisation of several inputs which are normally not imbricated with profit margins, key of which are the actual services the microfinance NGO provides in the process of micro-lending. The NGO becomes at once employer and service provider; its service however of microfinance itself generates a market.
Concluding remarks: beyond failures and success stories
If we follow James Ferguson’s insight (1994) that development is not always about its ‘failures’ – failure to alleviate poverty, bridge income inequalities or bring access to health care – but about the effects of these projects to depoliticise, then it becomes clear why it is necessary to trace the effects of microfinance projects as they become more numerous across Egypt. This expansion is precisely about linking NGOs to one another and creating new markets. The ‘hedging’ that these NGOs do when they leave Cairo – where their projects are by no means ‘successful’ – is that they perform a rural discourse about impoverishment to justify their microfinance interventions and guarantee some semblance of ‘success’. In the process, however, irrespective of microfinance’s success or failure, its effects are such that an infrastructure and market linkages are made; this in effect means creating employment, shifting revenue-generating activities in favour of the idea of profit rather than subsistence. Such processes ‘liberate’ these rural woman, or so the argument goes. Others in the village, including women, see opportunities of employment at these NGOs and are introduced for the first time to wage labour, something that in the past was only possible through the government. Necessary to this is the constant attack and dissolution of structures that do not operate via profit and encourage subsistence practices, namely cooperatives.
In this paper we have shown that development does occur but not in the teleology of market progress: a new infrastructure is assembled, as are new for-profit subjectivities, which now rest alongside previous ones. In other words, an entire apparatus has been created. Our enquiry shows that this has rested on certain notions of gender and progress, as well as certain representations of the ‘rural’ and the urban. It is this image of backwardness of the ‘rural’ as timeless and unproductive that serves as the misery that must be remedied such that the inhabitants of Egypt’s hinterland develop a subjectivity for a laissez-faire market that is for profit and accumulation.