A war on global poverty: the lost promise of redistribution and the rise of microcredit

Table of contents

Introduction: From Modernization to Microcredit
PART I. A WAR ON GLOBAL POVERTY
Chapter 1. The Trouble with Foreign Aid
“Assaulted by Waves from Left and Right”
The Challenge of World Poverty
Rejecting Trickle Down
Redistribution?
Chapter 2. Redistribution: South and North
A New International Economic Order?
“To Satisfy, as a Matter of Urgency, the Basic Needs”
Jimmy Carter’s Hunger
An International Tax
PART II. HOW WOMEN BECAME THE DESERVING POOR
Chapter 3. Developing Women
Making Women Modern
The Percy Amendment
“Was This Yet Another Experiment in Neocolonialism?”
Worldwide WID
The Mainstream Appeal
Chapter 4. Private Developments
Beyond Charity
Private WID
Poor Women as Entrepreneurs
The Reaganomics of Global Poverty
WID, WAD, GAD
PART III. THE MICROCREDIT MOMENT
Chapter 5. Macro Debt and Microcredit
Dangerous Debt
Promising Credit
The Grameen Model
Empowering Women?
Epilogue. The Development of Poverty

A history of US involvement in late twentieth-century campaigns against global poverty and how they came to focus on women A War on Global Poverty provides a fresh account of US involvement in campaigns to end global poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. From the decline of modernization programs to the rise of microcredit, Joanne Meyerowitz looks beyond familiar histories of development and explains why antipoverty programs increasingly focused on women as the deserving poor. When the United States joined the war on global poverty, economists, policymakers, and activists asked how to change a world in which millions lived in need. Moved to the left by socialists, social democrats, and religious humanists, they rejected the notion that economic growth would trickle down to the poor, and they proposed programs to redress inequities between and within nations. In an emerging "women in development" movement, they positioned women as economic actors who could help lift families and nations out of destitution. In the more conservative 1980s, the war on global poverty turned decisively toward market-based projects in the private sector. Development experts and antipoverty advocates recast women as entrepreneurs and imagined microcredit--with its tiny loans--as a grassroots solution. Meyerowitz shows that at the very moment when the overextension of credit left poorer nations bankrupt, loans to impoverished women came to replace more ambitious proposals that aimed at redistribution. Based on a wealth of sources, A War on Global Poverty looks at a critical transformation in antipoverty efforts in the late twentieth century and points to its legacies today.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691206332/a-war-on-global-poverty