Solving Poverty for Yourself: Micro-Enterprise Development, Microfinance and Migration

Microenterprise development and microfinance have been widely adopted as anti-poverty strategies internationally. They are popular because they provide a meeting-point between neo-liberal advocates of private enterprise and the market as creators and distributors of resources, and grassroots practitioners’ focus on local agency and the on-the-ground problems of poverty. Thus, like the category ‘informal sector’ before it, microenterprise finance has become a “category for both the management of growth, and for the management of equity” (Peattie, 1987, p. 855). Now, migration and the significant economic transfers represented by migrant remittances are coming to the attention of international development policy-makers and researchers interested in poverty reduction (Adams and Page, 2003). This paper traces these international development trends, and reflects on both the potential and the dangers of current attention to migrant remittances as a source of anti-poverty development finance, given the blind spots and biases that have plagued earlier anti-poverty efforts.