What would a feminist financial system look like? This podcast brings together leading women in the sector to define feminist finance and talk about how we get there. Hear from Dr Naaborle Sackeyfio, Barbara Magnoni and Rahel Diro in this trailer and subscribe to hear the full episodes launching next week.
Alice Merry (00:07):
Welcome to the podcast that takes a feminist look at the world of money. My name is Alice Merry and this is the Feminist Finance podcast. Today's interview is with Dr. Naaborle Sackeyfio. Naaborle is Assistant Professor of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University of Ohio. My interview with her today and the insights she shares during it really epitomize the reason I set up this podcast. Naaborle's research interests include governance, resource and energy, politics, gender and rural development, and our conversation today was just as wide ranging. Naaborle argues that we need to reimagine lending institutions to encompass the creativity and the power of women. I couldn't agree more.
Alice Merry (00:55):
Hi Naaborle and welcome to the Feminist Finance podcast. We're so happy to have you here today. Thank you for joining us.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (01:03):
Thank you Alice for having me. I appreciate this.
Alice Merry (01:06):
I want to start with a tricky question. We often hear about microfinance in terms of women's empowerment. To what extent do you think it's actually working?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (01:17):
I think that depends on which places in the world we're talking about. I think that context matters. Obviously in places that it originated in for example, Bangladesh and in parts of Southeast Asia, the success rates there have been quite remarkable. I think that when we look at places like the African continent for example, I think that the outcomes are more ambiguous and I think that the factors that contribute to making microfinance work are often formulated on a model that assumes applicability everywhere.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (01:57):
There's almost a one size fits all policy or assumptions behind these obviously remarkable principles that don't necessarily travel as well, and I think that there are ways that we can address those aspects of microfinance that aren't necessarily seamless across societies. Microfinance comes with a lot of assumptions about empowerment, about uplifting women in ways that don't necessarily acknowledge the economic vulnerabilities that women face, including social cultural norms, including institutions, including access to resources, capital assets, and lots of other factors that are really determinant for successful outcomes.
Alice Merry (02:41):
What do you think has been the reality for women in the countries that you've worked in on the African continent?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (02:48):
I think the reality has been that women are often not afforded the kind of autonomy and agency that would allow them to capitalize on the kinds of outcomes and financial independence to build successful enterprises in ways that truly uplift and empower their communities. Again, I think that's rooted in the sort of one size fits all policies. The informal economy plays a big role across many, many African countries in ways that I don't think lending institutions have necessarily anticipated or responded well to.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (03:29):
I think we need to address the dynamics underpinning, for example, energy as a key component of any modern economy. Access to energy is key for a lot of women in developing countries, particularly in Africa. And we simply haven't given enough thought to the ways in which invisible inputs, such as energy, structure the capacity for women to engage meaningfully in micro enterprise.
Alice Merry (03:55):
What does having or not having energy mean for women's ability to be successful in having a business?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (04:04):
In my experience, it's a key determinant. So women play such a huge role in, particularly women in rural areas, play such a enormous role in their households as procurers of energy, if you will. And because so much time is often spent on collecting wood fuels and biomass, that can detract from productive activities, productive economic activities that they might be embarking on.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (04:31):
Energy gaps mean energy poverty and they produce an inability to produce viable economic enterprises. Someone who has a sewing machine business who isn't able to afford electricity, for example, is going to see her business suffer.
Alice Merry (04:49):
And we know that the microfinance industry has also tried to play its role here. We've seen kind of a boom in pay as you go and digital payments for electricity. How do you see those solutions fitting together? Does the microfinance industry have a role here?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (05:06):
The quandary for me lies with the capacity for balancing market oriented approaches with equity concerns. Because, even as pay as you go systems are certainly transforming the continent in positive ways, arguably, we still have to acknowledge that a large number of people, especially women, especially women who are poor, cannot afford the pay as you go system, right?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (05:34):
So there has to be a way that we can also include frameworks, novel, innovative frameworks that also manage to balance these in some ways competing frameworks.
Alice Merry (05:50):
And how do you think that we can make financial institutions, governments and so on, more responsive to women's needs and give women more space to articulate their vision and their needs within these kinds of institutions?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (06:06):
Alice, it's an excellent question and one that I hope I can do some justice to. One way that I imagined that happening is really in terms of dismantling the kind of masculinist, hegemonic, if you will, apparatus that governs lending institutions as we know it. There's been so much talk about women's empowerment and making sure that women are in top leadership positions, but that doesn't necessarily speak to addressing what I see as a vast problem. We need to be rethinking the spaces in which we can afford women the capacity to act decisively, right?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (06:46):
It's not to say we champion women's empowerment, we can't simply stop there. We have to really afford the space in which women can act decisively with agency. And I think that, that requires re-imagining lending institutions from the perspectives of women. One way to do that might be as some have acknowledged investing in a brain trust of sorts, right? Collecting the ideas of women, the stakeholders themselves to think about the ways that women can create networks of communication in a knowledge economy that builds on the experience, lessons learned from lending practices to see the kinds of things that work across and between cultures.
Alice Merry (07:29):
In all the research you've done, have you seen any really promising or any really exciting examples of this kind of thing already happen or is this a far way off still?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (07:41):
It's far away... Or perhaps not. I think this is something in the making and I think it's possible. I think it's possible in the 21st century, particularly as the West casts its gaze increasingly on developing countries, emerging economies, Africa's lions, so to speak. I think that indeed Africa is going to be the site of the fourth industrial age, one in which technological innovation and investment are going to exert profound effects.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (08:14):
Then I think there's certainly hope, but it also depends too on, it depends on agency, it depends on creating new mechanisms, rooted in de-centralized options, if you will, where women are able to engage meaningfully and to create ideas that are also supported, right? And that might mean creating a new kind of lending institution, feminist finance for example.
Alice Merry (08:39):
I love it. I think often people think that technology might have some of the answers to these questions, especially in finance. Technology is often seen as really the hope of the future of a more equitable financial system. Are you hopeful about that?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (08:56):
I'm hopeful. There's certainly risks, but I would say, I would err on the side of being hopeful and optimistic. Particularly since we are a knowledge economy, we are in this vast information age and with so much potential for women, for empowerment, in ways that right now seem hard to imagine but are certainly present.
Alice Merry (09:25):
I think that in many of the countries on the African continent that you've worked in, I'm thinking of Ghana maybe as an example, we see a real impetus for supposedly empowering initiatives at the grassroots level - things like microfinance - and at the same time we see foreign and national finance policies, such as around foreign investments and natural resources, that can endanger these livelihoods. I wonder how you see that, that tension playing out?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (09:54):
That's an excellent question and as someone who increasingly sees herself as not just a social scientist of course, but as a political ecologist, this is a question that I have often thought about as well. I think that if we are truly interested in reducing the gender gap, particularly in the developing world, if we're truly interested in this question of empowerment, we're going to have to begin to think about equal capitalism.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (10:25):
If we consider exploitation around land and labor and natural resources, around property rights, for example. These are arenas that I think a new lending terrain might consider, right? As we witness heightened extractive economies on the African continent, I think it's key that we address gender equity concerns around what, for many, constitutes a kind of, yeah, I think an equal capitalism, right? Which is why in my mind, we must come up with new language to characterize sustainable development.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (11:13):
I don't think that sustainable development is necessarily the most apt term or concept for capturing vast perils as we hurdle forward into this, into the 21st century. I think we need to be thinking about how women, particularly those in rural areas, particularly those who are poor, can utilize resources in a renewable way. And that means that we also have to reconstitute our global economic exchange as we know it, right? From a purely extractive one to one in which we have a more symbiotic relationship.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (11:48):
Because right now, much of what we see is purely extractive, right? What we're seeing are disjointed policies. Good intentions, but ultimately disjointed outcomes because there really isn't enough linkages between thinking about, for example, land rights for women. What is the relationship between family rights, land tenure systems, land rights, and access to a number of amenities or resources for example, water security or energy security.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (12:19):
What is the role that all of those individual aspects play in empowering women? What is the role that they play in a microfinance arrangements? I don't think there's enough emphasis or even enough acknowledgement of how each of those are ultimately connected. And so at the grassroots level, we can do more to support locally-led initiatives that aim to bring more awareness to these issues.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (12:48):
At the national level, we can hold governments more accountable or incentivize those linkages, and at the international level, we can provide more agency and more autonomy for governments to think about what kinds of arrangements might work best, right? So making sure that at the local level, that people are afforded the capacity to come up with new ideas and new arrangements that tackle some of these problems.
Alice Merry (13:15):
I wonder if you could give an example just to make it really vivid for people listening of how these kind of maybe family rights and land rights, linking them with people's food security and water security. How might all these converge in an example?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (13:33):
Well, for one, acknowledging that social cultural norms don't always mesh well with the kinds of assumptions we have related to microfinance. People often have this assumption that women are at the forefront making decisions about a business. Sometimes that is true, sometimes that's not. You might have a partner who is making extensive decisions in terms of how resources from an enterprise are being allocated. If you have someone who is also who depends on biomass or wood fuels for example, or lives in an area where you know there's a lack of arable land or you you have someone who lives near an area that has been recently acquired by a government, if you have that taking place, that's a process that isn't necessarily reflected in the sort of macro economic landscape that informs lending institutions. And so, what we might see is a simplification of what is required for a woman's enterprise to succeed. Not taking into consideration that, well, water security, available land or arable lands, or even energy, access to energy - all of those might impact that woman's burgeoning business. If we begin to pay more attention to those aspects, then we can shift our thinking in ways that produce better outcomes.
Alice Merry (15:04):
I wanted to ask you the last question, which I'm asking everybody who I'm interviewing the same thing. What would a feminist financial system look like for you? If you had the power to kind of snap your fingers and design it any way you wanted? How would it look?
Naaborle Sackeyfio (15:20):
Ah, I love this question. I love this question. It's one that I could marinate on for quite a while, but I will say this. Feminist finance to me is re-imagining finance from the standpoint of women. It's a dismantling, if you will, of what I see as an inherently masculinist framework, which should be recast to reflect the positionality of women.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (15:49):
Feminist finance is rethinking finance itself from the standpoint of women to give women more agency, particularly in this increasingly interconnected and globalized world marked by unprecedented knowledge economy, if you will. For me, feminist finance involves expanding this notion of what some call a brain trust to reconfigure the ways in which women in the developing world can again capitalize on the experiences of other women in terms of lending practices and best practices, if you will, lessons learned to transfer and to share knowledge in ways that empower them.
Naaborle Sackeyfio (16:35):
And I mean, that's what feminist finance means for me. It's a new way of re-imagining the lending institutional landscape in ways that truly encompass the creativity and the power that women have.