The hidden labor of repayment: Women, credit, and strategies of microenterprise in northern Honduras

Abstract

Microlending programs, commonly directed at women and presented as a solution to global poverty, provide borrowers credit to support small, informal income-generating activities. These initiatives have garnered much attention from anthropologists, who have long been interested in the social life of credit and debt. Despite numerous anthropological studies critiquing the social and economic consequences of such lending practices, they continue, bolstered by the affective dimensions of philanthropic marketing and the current embeddedness of microloans in local economies. This contradiction has led to more recent ethnographic work demonstrating the interaction of microloans with other forms of debt and credit in the social economy of borrowers. Building on this recent work, this article draws on ethnographic data from microloan borrowers in northern Honduras and the Bay Islands and contends that the activities associated with microlending participation and repayment may be understood as a form of productive, though hidden, labor. The article suggests further avenues of inquiry into the long-term economic and cultural transformations that microlending has precipitated."Todo el mundo opera con préstamos!-Everyone operates with loans!" exclaimed a woman during a group meeting of microloan borrowers in a small coastal town in Honduras. In this observation, she summarized the experience of many women on the northern coast and in the Bay Islands of Honduras who have come to rely on microloans as an accessible livelihood strategy. Microlending 1 agencies are widespread here and, for the most part, loan primarily to women who run small, informal, often itinerant businesses. During this meeting, the group lamented that microloan repayment schedules were fixed, whereas the women themselves, their working patterns, and their multiple work activities were not. They discussed the difficulty of coordinating loan repayment schedules, local 15-day salary expectations, and numerous unpredictable and far-reaching informal credit relationships. The stakes for balancing such socioeconomic obligations are high for women operating small businesses in the informal economy. They must ensure that loans are paid off on time and that personal relationships on which sales depend do not become strained. Striking this balance of credit and debt management in the face of microloan repayments requires a unique kind of time-intensive commitment that, I argue here, makes up the hidden labor of microfinance.Schuster (2015), in an extensive study of microfinance among borrowers and agencies in Paraguay, notes that ideas about creditworthiness encourage women borrowers to become flexible economic subjects, making the observation that women invest considerable effort and work in completing microloan repayments and covering multiple debts. Building on Schuster's (2014:573) observations, I draw on ethnographic research from northern Honduras among women microloan borrowers to examine the extent to which this kind of "labor of completando [completing]" imp...

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