Anke Schwittay

The Marketization of Poverty

Increasingly, transnational corporations (TNCs) see themselves, and are seen by multilateral development organizations and national governments, as part of the solution to global poverty alleviation. Guided by C. K. Prahalads theories about the “bottom of the pyramid” (BoP), TNCs are developing products and services for the billions of people living on a few dollars a day that are supposed to enable these poor people to enterprise themselves out of poverty. In the process, poverty and the poor are made amenable to market interventions by being constituted as a potential new market for TNCs. Hewlett-Packards (HP’s) e-Inclusion program was the first corporate-wide BoP initiative in the high-tech industry that aimed to create corporate and social benefits. An analysis of its company-internal evolution from an intrapreneurial initiative to a fully incorporated business operation is complemented by a study of e-Inclusions activities in Costa Rica, which aimed to improve the lives of rural Costa Ricans by providing access to HP technology and by creating new sources of income for electronic entrepreneurs. However, transforming the poor into protoconsumers of TNC products and services cannot address the structural drivers of their circumstances and will lead to neither the eradication of poverty nor a corporate fortune at the BoP.

The financial inclusion assemblage: Subjects, technics, rationalities

This article introduces financial inclusion as a global assemblage of subjects, technics, and rationalities that aim to develop poor-appropriate financial products and services. Microfinance forms the foundation, but also the boundary of the assemblage, which is premised on the assumption that the 2.7 billion poor people in the world who do not currently have access to formal loan, savings, and insurance products are in need of such offerings. The work of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at the University of California, Irvine, with its emphasis on ethnographic research into culturally grounded monetary practices and logics, is presented as an alternative to the quantitative, economic, and financial logics that drive the assemblage.

‘A Living Lab’ Corporate Delivery of ICTs in Rural India

Information and Ccommunication technologies (ICTs) are increasingly seen as essential tools in development projects that can create new sources of income, make governments more transparent and accessible, improve education and health care, and overcome social exclusion and discrimination. To harness these potentials, multinational hi–tech corporations are forming public–private partnerships with governments, development institutions and civil society organisations in the delivery of ICTs to the rural masses. This article analyses the work of the Hewlett–Packard Corporation (HP), in India, where its three–year i–community programme aimed to bring access to ICTs and resulting benefits to rural citizens of Andhra Pradesh. I will show that ICTs are not neutral tools of development as conceptualised by practitioners of ICTD, but are commodities produced by corporations with the ultimate aim to increase the corporate bottom line. They are imbued with relations of power that skew ‘partnerships’ and must fulfil corporate objectives that weaken their potential impact.

Experiential and empathetic engagements with global poverty: ‘Live below the line so that others can rise above it'

In recent years events that physically challenge Northern publics have emerged as a new form of engagement with global poverty. In this article we examine the ‘Live Below the Line’ (LBTL) campaign, which asks participants to live on a small amount of money equivalent to the international poverty line for five days, as an example of experiential exercises that complement physical challenges with the simulation of some aspect of poor people’s lives. Drawing on interviews with participants in the 2013 New Zealand campaign, we argue that LBTL creates a limited understanding of poverty focused on poor food consumption caused by low income. While participants were able to have a more embodied and empathetic engagement with poverty, they projected their own physical and emotional sensations onto imagined poor others. As a result, stereotypes about those living in poverty were reinforced rather than challenged.

Scaling inclusive digital innovation successfully: the case of crowdfunding social enterprises

There is a growing interest in how organizations and initiatives that innovate to use information and communication technologies for development (ICTD) can scale their operations, reach and impact. This article takes a systemic and socio-technical approach to analyse the successful scaling of a crowdfunding social enterprise. It traces the growth of the ‘innofusion’ network of the worlds first person-to-person microlending platform, with particular emphasis on practices of balancing along three dimensions: (1) the need for standardization to manage expansion across highly diverse geographical contexts and for adaptation, customization and diversification to produce locally meaningful impact; (2) online and offline strategies and (3) business and social aspects of the organization. Processes of techno-financial scaling made possible by organizational and technological innovation at the social enterprise, which is embedded in the San Francisco Bay Areas techno-entrepreneurial milieu, also enabled financial innovation among platform partners in developing countries.

Innovation@DFID: Crowdsourcing New Ideas at the UK's Department for International Development

Over the last decade, traditional development institutions have joined market-based actors in embracing inclusive innovation to ensure the sector’s relevance and impacts. In 2014, the UK’s Department for International Development’s (DFID) Innovation Hub launched Amplify as its own flagship initiative. The programme, which is managed by IDEO, a Silicon Valley-based design consultancy, aims to crowdsource new ideas to various development challenges from a broad and diverse group of actors, including poor people themselves. By examining the direction, diversity and distribution of Amplify’s work, we argue that while development innovation can generate more inclusive practices, its transformative potential is constrained by broader developmental logics and policy regimes.

Representing financial inclusion: The CGAP microfinance photo contest (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This article examines representations of financial inclusion through the lens of the CGAP microfinance photo contest. It situates the contests winning images within current contestations surrounding global financial inclusion strategies, to show how these photos construct particular representations of microfinance that legitimize CGAPs minimalist, commercially-driven model. The production of the need for large-scale financial inclusion is key to this model, which is depicted through gendered representations of microfinance beneficiaries. On the one hand, the CGAP photos present a shift from stereotypical images of female micro-entrepreneurs in traditional contexts to more complex images that disrupt such stereotypes while at the same time reinforcing other assumptions about microfinance. On the other, they bring men back into the picture as worthy microfinance recipients. While contributing to pluralist representations that valorize photography in developing countries, the CGAP microfinance photo contest is ultimately unable to portray the complexities and contradictions of financial inclusion interventions.