Derechos conferidos por la marca

Bangladesh is a traditional society that emphasizes strong kin-relations with members of the same community (Cain, 1991; Ellickson, 1988). Reciprocity is a part of human interactions, while cooperation is ubiquitous in social life (Anthony, 2005). The norms of generalized reciprocity is a highly productive component of social capital, which can more efficiently be used to resolve problems of collective-action, and kinship ties in this connection have a special role to play (Putnum, 1993). The female respondents I interviewed confirmed that people in the neighborhood are familiar with each other, and maintain everyday interactions with them. The study villages traditionally observe close social ties and kinship relations, which typify the general picture of social relations in rural society in Bangladesh. In this social setting, everybody knows each other living next door and in the broader community. Only in some exceptional cases does one find strangers living within the village community.

Almost all women knew each other before joining the microcredit programs because many of them had been introduced to the programs after being recommended by their kin. Some of the clients were sisters-in-law, mothers-in-law, aunts, or daughters-in-law who live in or around the neighborhood. Only an insignificant number of respondent women said that they were not familiar with the other group members before joining the microcredit programs. Some of them have come to these villages as brides, but they are few in number. In rural society a newly married bride is not expected to visit the neighborhood without permission from her husband

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or senior members of the family. Doing so is frowned upon by other members of the community too. When the bride becomes a mother of children she can go out and visit neighbors beyond the next doors. Informal social relations among the rural poor women prevail, and after joining the credit programs of Grameen Bank and BRAC their relationships have turned into regular and formal interactions, reinforcing the give-and-take nature of their relations to a great extent. There have been relationships and acquaintances between the women in the villages long before their participation in microcredit programs, but after joining the group-lending system they have been able to meet and mix with new people in the villages. One of my respondents named Tanjina of Grameen Bank shared:

“After my marriage, I came to my husband’s home here in this village. I did not know many people but only a few living next-door to me. Now I know many people [women] due to my involvement in credit programs. I have to go to the center and the center chief that I did not know before. Moreover, we have to join the group. We maintain communications with the group members for repayment.”

Most of the women are already familiar with one another in the community, with only a handful remaining unacquainted. The main reason for this is that young ladies in rural areas do not usually visit places in the community without a specific purpose. However, rural communities already have a culture of cooperation and tend to help other people in the community where necessary. In rural Bangladesh, borrowing from others is not unusual. Many of the transactions are made within kinship groups and family members, while some of them are patron-client relationships (Dowla, 2006). Poor social and economic conditions of the people force them to be dependent upon others for a variety of material and nonmaterial needs. Rural social structure fosters informal relationships amongst the community members. NGOs in this connection very finely and artfully happened to reinforce and utilize these existing social relations through microcredit programs, which bound all borrowing women in regular social and economic relations. Lazar (2004) argues that they [NGOs] “rely upon women’s existing networks of family and friends, and associated cultural understandings and obligations, in order to ensure loan repayment” (p.10). What were once occasional and informal relations have now become regular and formal relations in an organizational and structural manner. It is worthwhile to mention that poor women usually do not have any scope to be in a formal organizational structure where sustained economic exchange is maintained. Microcredit programs provide the space for these women to have a platform where they have to make a scheduled visit in a regular process, opening up a new world of social and economic relations. Although these new

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dimensions of social and economic relations have been created, there has been the reverse effect for relations between poor women after entering the new arena of interactions. This is credit that causes conflicts among the clients at one point whereas in the opposite case builds the base of cooperation. The conflict and cooperation centering on the borrowing and paying the loan money back has been the unfortunate reality of the poor credit-borrowing women within the dynamics of social interactions and new spectrum of relationships. The next part of the analysis follows the processes of how microcredit programs have developed new dimensions of social relationships juxtaposing the conflicts of interests and norms of cooperation, and how that contributes to reinforcing the existing social capital that poor women generate amongst themselves.