Empowerment Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Community Leadership and Empowerment Outcomes in a Sex Worker-Led Micro-Banking Intervention in Kolkata, India

Background and Significance: Microfinance, or the provision of small scale financial services to the resource poor, has been heralded as an international vehicle of economic empowerment for women. Critiques of microfinance, however, point to fallacies in the empowerment logic undergirding microfinance. Microfinance assumes that increased public mobility, independent household financial decision making, and entrepreneurial engagement will be necessarily experienced as empowering by participants. Ethnographic research in microfinance saturated communities has called these assumptions into question and exposed experiences of social shame and partner violence as a result of microfinance participation. Scholars suggest that disempowering outcomes are the result of top-down intervention development that is out of touch with the cultural contexts of microfinance receiving communities. This study posits a women’s cooperative bank led by sex workers in Kolkata, India as an alternative micro-banking intervention which may be better equipped to understand complex community power dynamics and develop economic empowerment interventions accordingly.

Methods: 80 semi-structured interviews were conducted with bank members (n=60), staff, and organizational key informants (n=20). Participants were recruited through convenience and snowball sampling methods.  Participant observation was also conducted in bank offices and in the red light district. Data were collected and analyzed according to a modified grounded theory.

Results: Elements of the organizational structure and culture of the sex worker cooperative bank promote culturally-specific economic empowerment among its members in three ways. Firstly, by providing affordable and accessible financial services the bank has undermined the financial stronghold previously held over sex workers by coercive community members such as money-lenders, madams, and long-term clients. Secondly, bank leadership transforms possible adversaries into allies by conducting outreach with powerbrokers in the red light district, inviting madams to participate in banking services and discussing the benefits of sex worker bank membership with clients. Finally, the proliferation of bank membership in the community has allowed sex workers to build financial assets. Many of these members have used savings to purchase buildings which they sublease to other sex workers, shifting the role of madam in the community from a position of power to a non-hierarchal business relationship, creating more equitable labor relations for sex workers.

Discussion: The cooperative bank has systematically altered economic power dynamics in the sex worker community by accounting for complicated interpersonal relationships in the red light district. This approach belies the dichotomous victim/perpetrator conceptualization of economic disempowerment seen in microfinance research. The bank’s sex worker leadership possesses intimate knowledge of community cultural contexts and has built the bank on this invaluable foundational knowledge.  This study demonstrates the importance of community leadership in achieving successful and sustainable economic empowerment interventions.