‘Trust No One’: The Logics of Microfinance, Depending on Whom You Ask

Microfinance became a silver bullet for “eradicating poverty” in the early twenty-first century. Framed as a tool to address the critiques of aid as inefficient and encouraging dependency, its proponents praised it for replacing tired forms of donor government assistance and free “handouts” with a uniquely market-based innovation, which is also supposed to produce social cohesion and even peace. This chapter, however, features interviews with people in South Sudan and Uganda who decided not to apply for or accept microfinance loans. Their rationales show how, by design, microfinance produces new breeds of paternalism that must be scrutinized. Even more ironic is the fact that microfinance represents a rebranding of African forms of savings that accorded much better with communal ethics and provided a more sustainable means of supporting wellbeing on the continent.