1 Chapter 16 CHAPTER 16, MICROFINANCE AND THE ‘WOMAN’ QUESTION Kate Maclean Abstract This chapter highlights the importance of maintaining a gendered approach in considering alternatives. Microfinance’s targeting of women borrowers has been pernicious in many ways, as other chapters in this volume demonstrate; many scholars, have highlighted the corrosive effects of using social networks as collateral, particularly when the focus is entirely on the financial sustainability of the institution rather than women’s empowerment per se. Nevertheless, the way certain feminist organisations have used microfinance has been instructive in terms of the gendered exclusion and oppression inherent in the way economic development is understood and generally practised. The chapter ends by summarising critiques of microfinance from the point of view of feminist economics, and, looking forward, highlights the need to re-think the economy with gender as the key category of analysis in order to offer alternatives which have a genuine promise to empower women. Introduction People are no longer evangelising about microfinance in the way that they were when I first started researching the topic in the early 2000s. Widely held as a development panacea, the intervention admits of a variety of techniques and styles, but in essence consists of the provision of small loans on the basis of a group guarantee. In its hay- day, microfinance was deemed to be an appropriate intervention to address the ills of under-development, and was hailed not only as a solution to the market failures that