BANKING ON WOMEN’S LABOUR: RESPONSIBILITY, RISK AND CONTROL IN VILLAGE BANKING IN BOLIVIA KATE MACLEAN * King’s College London, UK Abstract: The village banking approach to microfinance aims to empower women by giving them responsibility for and control over certain aspects of the intervention. This paper explores how women members negotiate participation in the bank and analyses the relationship between responsibility, risk and empowerment. It is based on an ethnographic study in Luribay, Bolivia where the microfinance institution Credit with Rural Education has been operating since 2000. The village bank is placed in the context of gender relations in Luribay and ideas of risk, responsibility and empowerment explored in that context. Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords: microfinance; village banking; women; Bolivia; gender and development 1 INTRODUCTION Village banking is a microfinance technique that is used to target those most marginalised from the market, often rural women. In addition to credit and savings facilities, members are given control over certain aspects of the intervention and training sessions are provided in regular group meetings. The group jointly guarantees the initial capital, takes responsibility for repayments and accounts, and holds the money locally between repayments to the bank, allowing the group itself to accrue capital. It has been claimed that putting the management of the village bank in members’ hands is an empowering aspect of the intervention (Simanowitz and Walter, 2002; Westley, 2004), and taking on responsibility is associated with autonomy, authority and empowerment: Journal of International Development J. Int. Dev. (2010) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.1744 *Correspondence to: Kate Maclean, Department of Geography, King’s College London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS, UK. E-mail: kate.maclean@kcl.ac.uk Copyright # 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.