Give a person a loan and will she be fed a lifetime? Microcredit, aquaculture and capabilities in the Bolivian Amazon
Date
2018-05-01
Authors
Eid Valdiviezo, Ahmed Guillermo
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Abstract
The development interventions of the past thirty years have relied on microcredit
and other microfinancial services as a way to include the poor in the dynamics of the
free market, so they may have a better chance of benefiting from economic development.
Nowadays, the microfinance industry in Bolivia is highly developed, and the country is
usually mentioned next to Bangladesh and India as a success case of microcredit, as a
myriad of microfinancial institutions operate combining credit, savings and insurance with
education, women empowerment or production efforts. In this setting, the Peces Para la
Vida II project was started in Bolivia in early 2015, with the objective of improving food
security in Bolivia through the promotion of small-scale aquaculture and fisheries in the
Bolivian Amazon. As a part of this promotion strategy, a microcredit component was
included in the project with the intention of scaling up the benefits found in the first
stage of the project via an individual microcredit component and a group microleasing
operation. Using a qualitative application of an analytical framework that combines
Amartya Sen’s capability approach and the Department for International Development’s
sustainable livelihoods approach, this thesis will argue that unless certain conditions on
access to markets that enable savings and wealth creation are met, individual microcredit
alone may not be sufficient to lead its users towards capabilities that ultimately improve
their access to better endowments of various types of capitals, and that the group leasing
operation appears to be more promising in terms of allowing those involved as it tackles
productivity and market issues simultaneously, but with an implementation plagued with
problems and the short time the operation has been underway, it would be premature to
be definitive about these results.
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Keywords
Microcredit, Capabilities, Aquaculture, Livelihoods