Banking the unbanked: Financial inclusion and economic sustainable development for women? : Decolonial perspectives on the gendered migration-remittances-development nexus

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Linköping university - Department of Culture and Society (IKOS) Master´s Thesis, 30 Credits – MA in Ethnic and Migration Studies (EMS) ISRN: LiU-IKOS/EMS-A--20/07--SE

Banking the unbanked: Financial inclusion

and economic sustainable development for

women?

Decolonial perspectives on the gendered migration-remittances-development nexus

Heidi Källoff

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Abstract

Over the last decade, a new trend of Global Remittances has emerged within the international development community, especially a growing interest in women’s migration and remittances, and their potential for poverty reduction and economic growth. Due to the staggering amount of transnational money transfers, migrant remittances have become a central component in multilateral discussions on alternative development financing, and has been included in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The present study thus explores the multiple ways in which this gendered migration-remittance-development nexus has come to play out the recent years, seeking to understand how the “banking the unbanked” logic along with microfinance profit-making agendas serves neoliberal governmental and infrastructural discursive formations of transnational migration and its development impact. By using a decolonial approach, the study uses critical discourse analysis to scrutinize selected multilateral actors’ policy documents to explore in what ways migrant women’s “financial inclusion, independence and economic empowerment” have been included in the goals and targets within the 2030 Agenda. The main finding is that the rights-based approach towards migrants in the sustainability discourse rather tends to dismantle migrant agency into monetary practices which have come to be an important means for the financialization of migrant and non-migrant communities as well as for the transmittance of western knowledge doctrines, and in turn, are to prolong regimes of “modern slavery.”

Keywords:

Remittances; the global remittance trend; financial inclusion; economic democratization; sustainable development; austerity; gender mainstreaming; migration management; transnational business feminism; decoloniality

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List of Abbreviations

CMP – Colonial Matrix of Power CSR – Corporate Social Responsibility DFIs – Development Financial Institutions EU – European Union

GAD – Gender And Development GGG – Global Gender Gap GRT – Global Remittance Trend GFC – Global Financial Crisis GDP – Gross Domestic Product GNP – Gross National Product HLD – High Level Dialogue IOs – International Organizations IFIs – International Financial Institutions IPE – International Political Economy

IOM – International Organization for Migration IMF – International Monetary Fund

ILO – International Labour Organization IMC – Investment Migration Council MDGs – Millennium Development Goals MFIs – Microfinance Institutions

NGOs – Non-Governmental Organizations

OECD – Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development PPPs – Private Public Partnerships

SAPs – Structural Adjustment Policies SDGs – Sustainable Development Goals TBF – The Business Feminism

TBM – The Business Masculinity UN – United Nations

USD – The United States Dollar

WED – Women’s Economic Development WID – Women In Development

WEF – World Economic Forum

WEP – Women’s Empowerment Principles WTO – World Trade Organization

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Acknowledgements

It has truly been an honour to be surrounded by so many great, inspiring minds and kind hearts. Thank you

And thank you Branka Likić-Brborić for great supervision, intriguing conversations and especially for your faith in me throughout this process.

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1 Introduction

Over the last decade, a new trend of Global Remittances has emerged within the international development community, especially driven by a growing interest in women’s migration and remittances, and their potential for poverty reduction and economic democratization (Kunz, 2011, p. 1; p. 37). Migrant money transfer is thus often addressed as an untapped engine for sustainable development, and even more so after the global remittance peak in 2018 (ILO, 2018a, p. 35). Along these lines, harnessing remittances has become the main aspiration among several international institutions, seeking to forward the expansion of the so-called “digital financial ecosystem” including implementation of formal financial services and modern banking structures (WTO, 2018a, p. 74). In that sense, remittances have come to be at the heart of migration and development policies and have therein become the core part included into the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In the limelight of the 2030 Agenda, it is hence not surprising that the SDG 10c has received prominent attention due to its vast incentive on reducing the cost of money transfer from 7 percent, to less than 3 and above all, to eliminate corridors with costs higher than 5 percent (UN, 2015a). Overall, this seems to be an emergent task to fulfil, as the World Bank Group writes:

There is an increasing need for faster, cheaper and safer remittances […] Remittances are on track to become the largest source of external financing in developing countries. The high costs of money transfers reduce these benefits of migration (The World Bank Group, 2019a).

In other words, the staggering amount of money transfers has led to that migrant remittances more often are constituted as a financial flow for multilateral stakeholders to get their hands on and have thereby been a central component in discussions on alternative development financing, as the most underexploited, yet stable source of foreign currency (Bakker, 2015, p. 47; p. 85).

Nevertheless, some International Monetary Fund (IMF) reports have raised a red flag, since a lot of financial research increasingly suggests that remittances change economies in ways that reduce growth and increase dependence on funds from abroad, pushing migrants into a remittance trap (Chami, Ernst, Fullenkamp and Oeking, 2018, p. 44). The main issue addressed is that remittance-receiving households tend to rapidly increase their private consumption patterns instead of channelling money into common-good investments. “Irresponsible” spending habits are thus affecting whole market patterns, which becomes a vicious circle maintaining economic push-factors when, for instance, no new businesses are established in the countries of origin (Chami et.al, 2018, p. 45). In that regard, countries receiving remittances have come to rely on exporting labour rather than commodities produced with this labour, enforcing migrant flows into the Global North (Chami et.al, 2018, p. 47).

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1.2 “The Girl Effect”

Migration and remittances are not new phenomena as migrants have long been sending and investing their money in various ways. What is new, however, is the vast emphasis on women’s remittances and the gendered dimensions of global economic growth, framed in terms of a migration and development nexus.

Previously, women were often described as passive remittance-receiving non-migrants, but these stereotypes have been complemented with moderated attitudes in which migrant women nowadays not only are being framed as better remittance investors, but also as “better remitters” (Kunz, 2011, p. 53). Within bilateral and multilateral institutions, women’s economic behaviour has thus come to be described as “the girl effect”, in which female’s “innate altruism” and “biological ability” to sustain communities have contributed to get regions out of extreme poverty (Kunz, 2011, p. 67). Fostering female obedience has thereby been an efficient logic and response to the concerns of growing a “remittance trap” in which women’s migratory processes, and non-migratory processes are to enhance positive outcomes since women, in contrast to men, “tend to keep their families, relatives and the wealth of their communities in mind” (Kunz, 2011, p. 13f). Above all, migrant women are also said to be learning “other female values” during their time abroad, and in that regard, their migratory processes are to favour the overall social and economic global development procedure by the transmittance of progressive and cultural standards back home1 (Kunz, 2011, p. 13).

Migrant communities have in other terms become a new avenue for inciting development interventions in which migrants are important channels for the circulation of money, technology and knowledge (ibid, p. 57). Nevertheless, only a third of the women who migrate do so through formal pathways, which in turn enforce most women to use informal transfer systems (Davids and Driel, 2016, p. 234). To be able to stimulate productive and efficient money circulation, and to counteract “economies to get stuck in a lower-growth, higher-emigration treadmill” (Chami et.al, 2018, p. 47), the matter for multilateral stakeholders has thus become to “bank the unbanked”, seeking to financialize and instrumentalize women’s agency by encouraging them to take advantage of economic services and technologic modernism, including microfinance (Marchand, 2016a, p. 197). The endless profit-making agenda behind such market integration is yet disguised into a matter of women’s “financial inclusion, economic independence and economic empowerment” and what will be elaborated upon throughout this study, is how this gendered migration-remittance-development nexus has come to advance yet restrict mobility by fostering custom-made migrancies to fit into the overall agenda of “safe, orderly and regular migration” (Kunz, 2011, p. 66f; Rosche, 2016, p. 117).

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1.3 Aim of the study and research questions

Within the field of migration and development studies, previous academic conventional research has mainly focused on whether, and in what ways, migration remittances contribute to development and poverty reduction, often optimistic about the development potential (Bidegain Ponte, 2016, p. 84). According to critical migration studies, on the other hand, this narrow economic focus and “problem-solving-approach” at times tend to ignore the background of the current interests in remittances (Kunz, 2011, p. 41). Also when looking at gender analytical research within the field, the focus tend to be centred in victimizing questions on the precarious working conditions of migrant women, addressing their tasks of “caring, cooking and cleaning” within global supply chains (Hochschild 2000a, 2000b; Anderson, 2000; Lutz, 2011). There is moreover some, yet limited, research on the gendered migration-remittance-development nexus that focuses less on the “care regime” and more on gender in “global restructuring processes.” However, in these studies, the researchers are often pro universalized gender mainstreaming policy implementation with universalizing standpoints (Marchand and Sisson Sunyan, 2002; Parpart and Gardiner Barber and Marchand, 2015).

Nevertheless, all of the above mentioned studies have also contributed to the identification of two major dichotomous discourses within the global remittances trend, outlined as the “monetary-based” discourse (provided by the e.g. World Bank and IMF), and the “rights-based” discourse (provided by e.g. ILO and IOM) (Kunz, 2011). A common understanding is that these two discourses are separate and competing discourses challenging one another, and even more so after the adoption of the SDGs, in which several studies within the field hold that it is the first agenda taking into account the rights of the migrant. The 2030 Agenda however promises to consolidate both monetary and rights-based approaches to development under the rubric “inclusion for all.” This pitches sustainability in terms of its economic, social and environmental “triple bottom line.”

Against this backdrop, the main aim of this study is to examine how the 2030 Agenda has come to influence and has been influenced by the competing development discourses and the related dynamics between the two. I seek to do this by investigating the positions of and interplay between several international social and financial actors and their implicit or explicit adaption of (and/or approach to) the SDGs into respective policy discourses. This will be done by first and foremost looking at the advancement and femininization of the global remittance trend in relation to the formalization and effectivization of remittance transfers, targeting migrant women from the Global South through strategies towards their “economic empowerment, independence and financial inclusion.” I aim to do this by looking at linguistic discursive, interdiscursive and non-discursive patterns within selected strategies and multilateral policy documents, but also by looking at how discourses have been

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materialized through migration governing and infrastructuring practices. In order to meet these objectives, the following questions to elaborate upon are:

• How has the dynamic between the “rights-based” and the “monetary-based” discourses changed after the adoption of the SDGs in 2015?

• How can we understand the advancement and femininization of the global migration-remittance trend in relation to the formalization and effectivization of remittances?

• In what ways, if at all, is the gendered global remittance trend involved in the current spreading and deepening of neoliberalism?

In answering the questions I moreover seek to go beyond the general academic “Gender And Development” (GAD) 2 approach often proposed within gender, migration and development studies.

Within this approach nowadays, there is a rapidly growing consensus opposing white transnational feminism against the backdrop of feminist post-colonial theory. Such criticism is indeed valued, and I do not oppose it per se, but as will be outlined in-dept in my theoretical chapter and throughout the study, the main position of this thesis will instead be grounded in decolonial thinking and de-linking to investigate how the epistemology and ontology of western modernism constantly is re-shaping its objectives within the development regime (Mignolo, 2018a, p. 136). The approach will provide the study with important arguments in challenging normative conclusions made within some of the previous research and will also contribute to a constructive and critical understanding of gendering practices within the global remittance trend (GRT) and the project of sustainable development and migration.

2_{The GAD (Gender And Development) doctrine was coined in the mid-1980s, based on western academics’ criticism of World Bank}

and International Monetary Fund policies for structural change in third world economies. The GAD approach is based on radical and socialist feminism, promoting incorporation of social constructivism with the main argument that one must see the social dimensions behind gender differences in development. The approach thus moves away from women as a universal category and objects of change and introduces the concept of gender as complex power relations shaping people’s lives (Singh, 2017).

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2 Background

In this section, I seek to gently detangle the multi-layered patchwork thickly woven within the globalized development apparatus, to give a foundational overview of its current agenda and to highlight attitudes within the migration-development nexus often referred to as “a pendulum” swinging back and forth between optimism and pessimism. Firstly, by looking at the economic turbulence in the 1980s giving birth to a new development regime, followed by the 2008 economic crisis as the re-birth and re-establishment of a more cunning form neoliberalism aiming towards in-dept gender-mainstreaming implementation through the composition of the 2030 Agenda. Secondly, by taking a glimpse at the emergence of the Global Remittance Trend (GRT) and the gendered role of migration, in order to understand how both gender and migration remittances have made its’ way into the development discourse(s). Nevertheless, since migration long has been treated as a masculinized phenomenon and gender as a femininized, “gender” and “migration” development policies will merely be presented separated in this chapter, later to be compiled, questioned and re-constructed.

2.1 Once upon a time in Wasteland: the end of the Golden Age

“This is a man’s world, this is a man’s world – but it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl”, James Brown sang in the late 1960’s. Hitherto - women, albeit the increasing growth of western official feminism, had been invisible within international economic policy framings (Eisenstein, 2017, p. 35; Ahl and Marlow, 2010, p. 547). The decade of the 1970s began with an post-war global economic boom after a long period of fiscal stability, starting off with the collapse of the Bretton Woods system3 resulting in internal and external imbalances such as oil price shocks, high

inflation and unemployment in most Western countries (World Economic and Social Survey, 2017, p. 50ff; Blyth, 2013, p. 150f; Likić-Brborić, 2019, p. 34; Berell, 2012, p. 403).

The Keynesian economic system4 favoured in the 1960’s seemed ill-equipped and was to be

replaced by neoliberal free-market fundamentalism, fetishizing investment-friendly reforms and cross-border cooperation, in which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, as part of

3_{The Bretton Woods system is a set of multilateral agreements on international economic relations, negotiated July 1, 1944. The main}

goal was to create an efficient foreign exchange system, promoting global economic stability and growth, in which the IMF and the World Bank was established to provide less developed countries loans and mentoring. Nevertheless, since the US kept running deficits to various projects, the system collapsed in the 1970s (Kunz, 2011).

4_{Keynesian economics is named after the British economist John Maynard Keynes and is an economic theory contrasting classical}

economic theory. Instead of holding that the government will do more harm than good, Keynes focused on spending and suggested that if consumption spending falls, the government is to stimulate the economy by increasing spending and increasing the money supply. The main idea, in other terms, is called aggregate demand (and not supply), in which consumption, investment, governm ent spending and net export are the key pieces of the puzzle (Kunz, 2011).

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the Washington Consensus5 “sought to reduce the role of the welfare state in the developing world in

hope of stimulating economic growth” (Blyth, 2013, p. 162). However, in the case of the so-called “developing” world, Blyth (2013) argues, merging activities of the World Bank and IMF “became the financial police force behind the implementation of what were termed structural adjustment programs.”

Whilst shouting that the economy needed to be stimulated, climax had already been bypassed, and as a consequence of the ongoing liberalization, ex-colonies in Latin America and Africa ended up paying the highest price, which set the stage for the following debt crisis in 1982 (Bakker, 2015, p. 89; World Economic and Social Survey, 2017, p. 62). This marginality, however, was yet institutionalized through the Bretton Woods system and its international financial institutions (IFIs) in which the World Bank and the IMF - later companied with other independent institutions such as World Trade Organization (WTO), and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), became more important for policy making, affecting the “first world” and “third world” dynamics (Rai, 2002, p. 56; Likić-Brborić, 2019, p. 36). “Underdeveloped” countries were no longer permitted to govern their own economic development, but were forced to submit to the dedicated form of international investors, through so-called Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs)6, with even more devastating results such

as decline of public health facilities and renewed rise of poverty (Eisensten, 2017, p. 36; Likić-Brborić, p. 43; Tornhill, 2017, p. 12; Grosser and McCarty, 2018, p. 12; Moodie, 2013, p. 281).

In the 1990s, nevertheless, the United Nations (UN) tried to regain its’ intellectual leadership of the development discourse by organizing a series of international conferences with a people-centred, rights-based approach, attempting to contrast “the economic orthodoxy imposed by the Washington consensus” (World Economic and Social Survey, 2017, p. 64). Building upon the 1979s Convention of the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the fourth Conference on Women held in Beijing 1995 resulting in the “Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action” (BPfA), the Conference “World Summit for Social Development” in Copenhagen 1995 and the Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security, a new paradigm shift was to entrance the international political arena, promoting “fair globalization”. Hereto, the Women in Development

5_{The Washington Consensus was a set of neoliberal economic policy free-market recommendations for so-called “developing”}

countries during the 1980s. The consensus became the primary prescription for economic development around the world,

emphasizing macroeconomic discipline, trade liberalization, privatization, competition, deregulation, just to name a few. IMF and the World Bank played significant roles in the management of debts (lending money to countries in financial trouble and in “helping” less developed countries grow) (Bakker, 2015).

6_{Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) is a set of economic reforms and policies that a country must adhere to in order to secure a}

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(WID)7 doctrine were to be influenced by the more neo-Marxist and rights-based Women and

Development (WAD) approach (Sato, 2016, p. 150; Calcin, 2017, p. 72; Calcin, 2015, p. 294f). Before, the WID had merely been focusing on the empowerment of women, enrolling women into efforts to achieve e.g. poverty reduction. However, this approach faced a lot of criticism for only addressing women, and hence for being “gender blind”, resulting in what was to be re-labelled and re-defined as the Gender And Development (GAD) framework (World Economic and Social Survey, 2017, p. 65; Rai, 2002, p. 71; Torhnill, 2017, p. 32; Tine Davids, Francien Van Criel and Franny Parren. 2014, p. 398).

Although the GAD-approach emerged in response of shortcomings of WID, it has yet been a subject of co-optation8 (Calcin, 2015, p. 297). Not surprisingly, the IMF and the World Bank too joined this

swift turn and began to “produce an ideological case for SAPs of the great advantages these policies provided for women and girls” – starting to present women and girls as the key to sustainable development (Eisenstein, 2017, p. 36, Likić-Brborić, 2019 p. 36f). This two-way process have led to the emergence of a new, alternative “sustainable development” discourse, somewhat still at the heart of marketization, integrated into a neoliberal consumer culture, in which “feminism” has been commodified (Sato, 2016, p. 155). One the one hand, empowerment is framed as political resistance by- and for the marginalized, yet on the other hand, as a way for such “victim” to become a rational economic subject and actor (Sato, 2016, p. 154). Overall, the task therefore yet seem to tie Global South-nations into international capitalist regimes – still demonstrating what “development needs from women” to sustain (Rai, 2002, p. 70; Sato, 2016, p. 155; Calcin, 2015 p. 297; Spengler, 2001, p. 321).

2.2 “Add women and stir”

“It is striking to the extent to which the neoliberals have repeatedly taken ideas from the Left over the last half twentieth century and twisted them to their own purposes”, Mirowski writes, cynically trying to render how neoliberals have survived yet another economic crisis and even flourished in the midst of the chaos they wrought in 2008 (Mirowski, 2013, p. 11). How is it possible that the contemporary global financial system remains more or less unaltered? (ibid, p. 17f).

While it was widely agreed that global economic imbalances, growing inequality and financial deregulation contributed to the crisis, such agreement was forgotten swiftly and neoliberal policies –

7_{The WID (Women In Development) doctrine was coined in the mid-1970s, in response to welfarism and coincided with the rise of the}

Western feminist movement in 1968. The WID approach is thus based on western liberal feminism and neo-classical economic theory promoting women’s economic inclusion, labor market participation and productivity (Singh, 2017).

8_{Co-optation refers to the process of adding members to an elite group, usually an opposition, to manage and maintain domination.}

It’s a form of strategic manipulation, but could also be to appropriate/claim something as your own (e.g. a term) that were created by others, for a new or different purpose (Rai, 2002).

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again - have been continued with greater enthusiasm: seeking to reweave the entire fabric of society (Mirowski, 2013, p. 29). Indeed, neoliberalism did survive the American stock-market crash in 1987; Japan’s economic meltdown; the Mexican financial crisis in 1994; The Russian financial crisis 1998; the Asian Crisis and the IT crash at the turn of the new millennium. So, who would have thought it would have survived yet another global financial crisis – and above all, the worst of crisis since the Great Depression? (Kielos and Marcal, 2012, p. 137; Jones, 2008, p. 765; Berell, 2012, p. 340). Well, entering a new millennium was to enter a new doctrine of “Womenomics”, Eisenstein (2013) argues. While issues related to women and gender had been included in the development discourse since the 1980s, they became even more central within international development policy and aid during the 20th century (Bergeron, 2013, p. 6). In the year 2000, UN launched the Global Compact, today one

of the most well-known and largest public-private partnerships, closely followed by the construction and implementation of the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), in which leaders of 189 countries signed the declaration, committing themselves to achieving a concrete set of eight global goals by 2015 (Dhar, 2018, p. 49; Sato, 2016, p. 155). These goals were also interlinked with public-private cooperation where the MDG3 on “Gender Equality” was to be paired and serve the MDG8 “To develop a global partnership for development” (Bergeron, 2013, p. 6; Dhar, 2018, p. 50). The overall target was addressed to combat hunger, disease, extreme poverty, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women, in which financial institutions such as the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization too were to be situated at this new phase of globalization (Dhar, 2018, p. 51; Rai, 2002, p. 111; 136; Grosser and Moon, 2017, p. 17; Hickel, 2014, p. 536).

Although the MDGs received more blame than praise – often criticized for representing contradictory frameworks and commitment’s betraying those who needed justice the most – the integration of market doctrines offered new subjectivities (Dhar, 2018, p. 49f; Rai, 2002, p. 117). “Women do not lack capacity” IFIs argued, “they lack opportunities!” and furthermore, women in the Global South went from being victims to be saved by the west, towards neoliberal rational economic subjects with potential of becoming both entrepreneurs and consumers (Sato, 2016, p. 156). Investing in women were thereto depicted as “smart economics”, since women were portrayed as more likely to share their economic gains with their families and communities (Bergeron, 2013, p. 157). Women were also said to be more honest and trustworthy and hence more likely to repay their loans more reliably than men (Sato, 2016, p. 156; Hozic and True, 2016, p. 1; Spengler, 2001, p. 310).

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In the post-Washington Consensus, microfinance9 initiatives had long been praised as the most

efficient strategy to facilitate poor regions empowerment and the post-millennium era was therefore no exception (Rai, 2002, p. 136; Dhar, 2018, p. 60; Sato, 2016, p. 147f; Bergeron, 2013, p. 9). However, such “add women and stir”-approach shows how western masculinity norms – albeit the pro-gender equality mantra – are very central to the neoliberal policies, gender regimes and through capitalist reproduction and restructuring (Bruff and Wöhl, 2016, p. 6; Elias, 2013, p. 153). While fiscal austerities became the buzzword in the name of competitiveness, the post-2008 economic climate of increased “womenomics” became proclaimed as the cure for the problem associated with toxic and destructive market-masculinity – in order to re-establish a rational and sustainable global financial system (Roberts, 2017, p. 90). In other words, The Global Financial Crisis (GFC) one the one hand brought light to connections “between domestic and the macroeconomy, between private choices of seemingly gender neutral investors and public regulation of the economy, between individual homeowners and abstract global financial markets” and on the other hand, unfolded a pervasive form of masculinity in need of a “healthy dose of oestrogen” (Hozic and True, 2016, p. 1; Bruff and Wölh, 2016, p. 4; Roberts, 2017 p. 89; Ahl and Marlow, 2010, p. 545).

Strategic global sisterhood has hence become the new mechanism to comfort entangled issues of globalization that seeks to disseminate certain values through individualization (Ong, p. 31). Within this specific form of economic knowledge and practice – combined with a gendered symbolic order supporting the discourse around the implemented austerity politics – it seems like the gendered poor and marginalized “ended up as the disproportionate targets of austerity measures” in the aftermath of the GFC - saving neoliberalism from itself (Hozic and True, 2016, p. 2; Bruff and Wöhl, 2016, p. 8f).

2.2.1 “A healthy dose of oestrogen” in practice

We find many names for those we love and indeed, the growing neoliberal feminism has collected several associations within academic research and in the public debate such as market-feminism, free-market feminism, hegemonic feminism, imperial and managerial feminism, neo-feminism, governance feminism, transnational business feminism, and even as post-feminism and faux-feminism (Eisenstein, 2017, p. 41). Feminism is everywhere. You can eat feminism for breakfast, you can shower in feminism, shave your body in feminism, wear your feminism as a statement, run in feminism, get drunk by feminism and probably die in a feminist manner (Kielos and Marcal, 2012, p. 122). However, one night, while you are reading Ivanka Trumps feminist manifesto “Women Who Work”, drinking

9_{Microfinance is a baking service for people who otherwise do not have access to financial services, offering microcredits/microloans}

but also saving accounts and insurances, as well as financial and business-training and saving expertise. Usually, microfinance institutions are targeting people in poor rural areas seeking to “serve the unserved”, for people to overcome obstacles of poverty and to be able to establish business (Tornhill, 2019).

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feminist tea from your feminist cup with printed feminist inspirational quotes, wearing your favourite “YAY INTERSECTIONALITY” t-shirt, you might find it hard to “think positive” and “love yourself”, realizing that you have been tricked all along (Rottenberg, 2018, p. 2).

“Has feminism been co-opted by neoliberalism to legitimize anti-feminist policy goals?”, Calcin (2015; 2017) asks, questioning the swift materialistic and capitalist take-over and “cherry-picking”-approach of the many languages of feminisms. All of a sudden we have an extreme semantic diluted hotpot of liberal feminism, radical feminism, social constructivist feminism, ecofeminism, post-colonial and intersectional feminism and even a small pinch of Marxist feminism (Calcin, 2017 p. 70; Calcin 2015 p. 295). Returning to Mirowski (2013), it is indeed striking to the extent which the neoliberals have taken ideas from both the left and elsewhere, and managed to twist them to their own purposes.

Over the past fifteen years, there has been a profound shift in the terrain of Gender and Development landscape, resulting in trends increasingly showing interest in feminisms (Calcin, 2017, p. 71). After the global financial crisis (GFC) a lot of attention has been devoted to scrutinizing the emergence, intensification and institutionalization through business-friendly feminism, cooptated with logics of growth, profit and brand-management (Gregoratti, 2016, p. 222; Eyben, 2010, p. 275). Roberts (2012; 2016) frames this mess as the growth of The Business Feminism (TBF), manifesting itself through logics demonstrating the relationship between gender equality discourses and the power in development governance (Roberts 2012, p. 87; Roberts 2016, p. 8; Calcin, 2015, p. 302). Transnational Business feminism, Robert (2012) argues, “has emerged as part of the cure for the ails of transnational business masculinity (TBM)” recovering itself by selling its’ ”isms” as gender equality through strategic marketing saying: “Empower a woman and feed a community” (Roberts, 2012, p. 90; McCharty, 2017, p. 603; Hickel, 2014, p. 344; Moodie, 2013, p. 300).

Moreover, this business feminism seem to be very concerned tapping into women in the Global South remaining a “vast untapped resource”, referring to their lack of connection to the global financial market and framing such exclusion as “insecurity” (Roberts, 2012, p. 92). In this gendered economical narrative it is clear that the market cannot function without underlying work of social reproduction, in need to draw the poor, particularly poor women into capitalist financial relations via the extensions of microfinances (Roberts, 2012, p. 97; Rosche, 2016, p. 123; Grosser and McCarty, 2018, p. 13).

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More recently, the World Economic Forum (WEF)10 with its Global Gender Gap (GGG)11 reports

dilutes this well-torn rhetoric on microcredits with advanced arguments favouring the extension of microinsurance’s (Roberts, 2016, p. 12; McCharty, p. 604). The justification of selling yet another service to the global poor is made not only through addressing “women’s innate altruism”, but by the gendered conception of risk in which women are in greater need of insurances (Roberts, 2012, p. 98ff). These kind of verbal-erotic rhetoric do not only come from international financial institutions, but from intergovernmental and nongovernmental organizations too. Women have, in other terms, become the key to the expansion and deepening of finance (Roberts, 2016, p. 6).

2.2.2 The 2030 Agenda

So apparently, women’s financial inclusion is the most efficient and strategic market economic tool for increased GDP, at least if you trust gender mainstreaming policies. According to the McKinsey Global Institute (2015) women’s impact on the economy could be as significant as China and India’s general impact on the economy combined (Woetzel, Manykia and Dobbs, 2015, p. 1ff). If all countries were to match this progress toward gender parity, it could produce a boost of annual global GDP as much as 12 trillion USD by 2025 (Cingano, 2014, p. 42ff).

“Donald Trump should have invested in gender equality rather than in abusive womanizing reformism”, you might think to yourself. Well, he kind of did. Despite him reintroducing the Global Gag Rule among other harmful things, the Republican Party has proudly been announcing their new Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative. At the White House homepage it is written:

In February 2019, President Trump established the (W-GDP) Initiative, the first whole-of-government effort to advance global women’s economic empowerment – seeking to reach 50 million women in the developing world by 2015 through US Government activities, private-public partnerships, and a new, innovative fund (Whitehouse, 2019; WGDP, 2019, p. 7).

Taking a closer look, the US have established 14 new projects with more than 200 public-private partnerships (PPPs), supporting women prospering in the workforce, women succeeding as entrepreneurs, and women enabled in the economy, with projects across 22 countries, e.g. in Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Benin, Ethiopia, Georgia, Ghana, Indonesia, Rwanda, Senegal and South Africa. (USAID, 2019).

Has Trump overcome his anti-feminist agenda? No. This is business as usual and a growing trend also across Europe. In several EU-member states, gender equality-related institutions have been shut down, have had drastic budget cuts, or have been enclosed on the other bodies of government, due to

10_{The World Economic Forum (WEF) is an international organization headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland, that brings together its}

members on a yearly basis to discuss issues concerning the world political economy (Investopedia, 2019).

11_{The Global Gender Gap Report is published by the World Economic Forum, in which The Global Gender Gap Index is used to}

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so-called “sound financing” and other austerity measures (Buff and Wöhl, 2016, p. 14; Mirowski, 2013, p. 2; Blyth, 2013, p. 37ff). This in turn, shows how gender equality is absorbed into the doctrine and politics of competitiveness, internally treated through neoconservative frames, whilst being put into neoliberal practices externally (Bloom, 2018, p. 22).

From Beijing and onwards, gender mainstreaming integration has been a well-adopted international goal, building upon the WID- and GAD approaches. As mentioned previously, such implementation has been launched as a global strategy, instrumental in normalizing certain neoliberal subjectivities. (Chant and Sweetman, 2012, p. 519f; Davids, Van Driel and Parren, 2014, p. 396). In the light of such agenda, postcolonial thinkers have long been criticizing both the “global sisterhood”-initiatives as well as the gender mainstreaming frameworks for being white, imperialist, heteronormative, built upon gender binarism, Eurocentrism, universalism, and for completely lacking a sense of intersectional awareness (Carby, 1982, p. 112; Yuval-Davis, 2015, p. 19). In other words, clear statements against gender mainstreaming has been made within post-colonial activist circles, with the message: “Keep your saviourism and do-good feminism for yourself!” However, instead of listening to the voices rebelling to be heard, not surprisingly, the terminology of intersectionality has instead been institutionalized within mainstream policy and adopted of all major international social and financial organizations (Yuval Davis, 2015, p. 20). Although the uptake of the term was rather slow, it is nowadays one of the most well-used catch-phrases within gender mainstreaming debate.

One might perhaps argue that it is absurd to add a mainstream-critical tool into mainstream politics, but by now, we know that ignorance is disguised in goodwill; all they wanted to do was to “reconstruct and reconfigure” institution structures maintaining social injustices. What they did, however, was to add just another tool to construct “intersectional identities” to exploit people at the bottom of the societal pyramid at micro, meso and macro level (Castro Varela and Dhawan, 2016, p. 22; Bastia, 2014, p. 238ff).

Moreover, the development vocabulary of intersectional effectiveness, efficiency and impact assessment have become the key policy goals within both the UN and within several IFIs (Davids, Van Driel and Parren, 2014, p. 401f; Roberts, 2012, p. 100). Accordingly, the 2030 Agenda was lauded particularly for the inclusion of comprehensive goals on gender equality (goal 5) as well as its preventive approach of mainstreaming gender throughout all 17 goals. Through the Goal 8, the SDGs address the need to protect labour rights and promote safe and secure working environments, in particular women migrants. In addition to goal 5 and 8, the interaction between women and migrant workers can be found in a number of goals and indicators. This is, nevertheless, not surprising since

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migration has been identified as functional for development and included into the SDGs, later to be addressed 12 (Holliday, Hennerbry and Gammage, 2019, p. 2553).

Furthermore, the agenda includes 169 targets, instrumentalized to promote worldwide triple-win outcomes, with contributions to political, economic and social justice and development (UN, 2015a, p. 15). One could say that the agenda seeks to address the MDGs unfinished business, aiming to “respect, protect and promote human rights and fundamental freedom for all, without discrimination” (UN, 2015a, p. 10f). Both monetary as well as rights-based aspects are adopted in the understanding of development, yet such multidimensional approach has been problematized for its corrupt dynamic of financialization resulting in negative impact on global equality (Esquivel, 2016, p. 9ff; Bidegain Ponte and Rodrigues Enriques, 2016, p. 84). Nevertheless, the SDGs have become yet another buzzword of today’s international political debate, especially in relation to Global South-development, seeking to “transform the world” towards democratization and modernization (Banerjee, 2003, p. 143). Hence, three months ahead of the 2030 Agenda, the Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA)13 was

adopted to involve financial investors along with the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO, promoting innovative impact investments, public-private partnerships (PPPs) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) (Stuckmann, 2018, p. 13; Esquivel, 2016, p. 11). However, it is not surprising that the expansion of micro-credit, micro-insurance and other micro-finance initiatives was outlined as the top-one priority, framing it as an increasing collective desire for populations to consume and

12_{To be developed on page 18.}

13_{The Addis Ababa Action Agenda (AAAA) was the outcome of the 2015 third International Conference on Financing for Development}

held in Ethiopia. The agenda seeks to align financing flows and policies with economic, social and environmental priorities. Before AAAA, development financing had no formal links the UN but were a stand-along process – but now has a strong foundation to support the 2030 Agenda as a harmonized (yet parallel) process (UN, 2015).

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invest, especially women. To be able to establish business-related relations, women’s economic empowerment and financial inclusion is hereto addressed in relation to access to ownership, control over land and other property, and access to financial services (Dhar, 2018, p. 55; Woetzel, Mynka and Dobbs, 2015, p. 25ff).

2.3 The migration-as-development mantra

Not only did gender equality become a trend within development policies in the aftermath of the Bretton Woods neoliberal paradigm, so did migration – and ever since, the economic migrant have become a neoliberal subject put in monetary terms only efficient if incorporated into the financial market (Bakker, 2007, p. 47).

During the 1990s, the position of migration was transformed from being an issue towards becoming a tool for co-development (Marchand, 2016, p. 190; Moseuela, 2017, p. 15). This successively happened after the Cairo Programme for Action in 1994, addressing migrants as human resources and migration as a solution and an untapped potential for world-wide poverty reduction. This programme has been defined as the milestone within the Global Remittance Trend (GRT), in which migration no longer were to be seen as a failure of development nor as “brain drain” from the Global South, but as an outcome of globalization due to accessible infrastructures and technologies (Kunz, 2011, p. 27). At the core of such optimism was the idea that remittances could replace previous aid regimes, to become the new – less whimsical – form of development financing (Lavenex and Kunz, 2008, p. 441). Although the International Labor Organization (ILO), and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) had recognized this potential several years before, the trend was to be triggered by rapidly increasing migration flows and hence increasing amounts of migrant remittances sent back home (Kunz, 2011, p. 36; Kunz 2008, p. 189; Brown, 2006, p. 55) From the 2000s and onward, several conferences, reports, programs, agendas and other engagements have therefore been seeking to mobilize money transfers for development purpose, and like all forms of market behaviour, stressing the transformative power of remittances by framing them as universal social insurances (de Winter, 2016, p. 173; (Marchand, 2016, p. 190; de Winter, p. 173; Kunz, 2011, p. 36).

In 2000, the ILO organized the conference “Making the Best of Globalization: Migrant Worker Remittances and Micro-Finance”, followed by the World Banks “Global Development Finance Annual Report in 2003, entitled “Worker’s Remittances: An Important and Stable Source of External Development Finance (Kunz, 2011, p. 37). The very same year, this shift was also addressed by the International Conference on Migration Remittances (Kunz, 2011, p. 35; Kunz 2008, p. 186), and the list goes on from 2005 and 2006 with increased involvement of the Inter-American Development Bank (IBD) and the European Commission (Kunz, 2011, p 38; Brown, 2006, p. 56).

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Moreover, the Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM) report 2005, is yet another keystone promoting Migration and Development Policy discourse, especially devised and supported by Swedish and Swiss governments (Bakker, 2015, p. 33). In 2007, the second International Forum on Remittances took place in Washington D.C, organized by the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), to shed light on the potentials of remittance flows and to “explore the links between remittances and banking, technology and microfinance” (Kunz, 2011, p. 39; Bakker, 2007, p. 49). At the same time, the Global Forum on Migration and Development (GFMD) was imitated in 2007, to be held in 2008-2018, involving a range of transnational organizations participating in the Global Migration Group (GMG), and more recently, the OECD, centred in questions on how migration contributes to economic growth and poverty reduction (Petrozziello. 2011, p. 57f; Schierup et.al, 2018).

Today there are many different institutions involved in the global remittance trend such as the ILO, IOM, the World Bank, IMF, Inter-American Development Bank, Women’s World Banking, The Global Commission on International Migration (GCIM), MIF, and the list goes on (Kunz, 2011, p. 54). The main interest however, yet seem to be “banking the unbanked” to increase the number of people included in the formal banking system (Kunz, 2011, p. 54). This is because statistics shows that remittances have quadrupled since the 2000s – and above all – are altogether three times as big as the world’s total official aid (World Bank, 2019a). In these numbers, however, informal financial flows are not included, but expected to be tripled if it was to be formalized. Informal flows therefore is to be intercepted and channelled by increased access to modern technology and financial systems, to “equally” increase global wealth “for all” (Brown, 2006, p. 56 Lavenex and Kunz, 2008, p. 446f). Nevertheless, such excitement and engagement towards development tend to be contradictory since the direction of global migration flows lately have become more complex and pessimistic again. Especially after the post 9/11 period, in which increased securitization and migration management agendas aiming to prevent terrorist financing and money laundering has been adopted (Brown, p. 56). Remittances are, in other terms, inextricably linked with national and international immigration policy (Menz, 2009, p. 257). Parallelly with the Development nexus, there is hence a Migration-Security nexus in which uncontrolled migration is viewed as a potential threat of the receiving country (Kunz and Lavenix, p. 440). Added upon this, is the increasing regulation on internal and external border controls around the world, where development cooperation more and more tend to be used as a means to control migration pressures for the take of receiving countries (often in the Global North) (Taureck, 2006, p. 56f; Fierke, 2015, p. 13; Guild, 2009, p. 40; Balzacq, 2016, p. 55f). The migration-development mantra have thus been conflicting with questions on what, or whom to be included in national, yet global economic wealth, welfare and safety nets, since securitization constantly is taken

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into new areas and fields of thought, especially interlinked with mobility and migration (McDonald, 2008, p. 570f; Huysmans, 2006, p. 45).

2.3.1 “Progressive femininization of migration”

Women and gender issues have come to the international Global Remittance Trend agenda relatively recently (Kunz, 2011, p. 64). When the international community became interested in remittances in the late 90s, gender was generally a non-topic and most publications did not include references to women or to gender issues (Kunz, 2016, p. 211; Lavenex and Kunz, 2008, p. 441) If female migrants were mentioned, they were predominantly framed as “associational migrants” or as “trailing wives” who followed their spouses (Bastia and Piper, 2019, p. 16). In the sector of international development cooperation where the focus were shifting towards private initiatives and PPPs, migrant communities were seen as a new avenue for inciting development interventions (de Winter, 2016, p. 173).

Although women’s potential for development long had been addressed elsewhere, migration has continuously been seen as a masculinized discourse. Nevertheless, the increasing number of female migrants and their contribution to development have, from 2005 and onwards, got increased attention in the development discourse (Lavenex and Kunz, 2008, p. 440). The milestone was the UN High-Level Dialogue on Migration in 200614, followed by the annual meeting of the Global Forum on

Migration and Development (GFMD) (Van Naerssen, Smith, Davids and Marchand, p. 5; Kunz, 2016, p 212; Shierup et. al, 2018.). Thereto, United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (UN-INSTRAW), also became an important factor in the framing of the conceptual gendered-remittance discourse (Van Naerssen, Smith, Davids and Marchand, p. 6; Robert, 2006, p. 17).

Several of these actors asked themselves “does gender explain how the money will be spent, invested or saved?” and as women came into the picture, other dimensions of remittances were taken into account (Van Naerssen, 2016, p. 40; Roberts, 2016, p. 41). Within the gendered-remittance nexus, “social remittances” have become equally important as “monetary remittances”, whereas relationships within households, communities and society as a whole were to be affected by circulations of ideas, values and attitudes (Robert, 2006, p. 20; Sørensen, 2005, p. 6) In comparison to the masculinized migration-development nexus, the femininization of labour migration is not only to be framed as a financial project, but also as development of progressive femininization worldwide (Bachan, 2018, p. 1). Although the proportion of remittances sent by women generally is lower than those sent by men, women still tend to send a higher proportion of their total income (Roberts, 2016, p. 25). Through the

14_{The UN High-Level Dialogue on Migration is a forum in which several actors discuss the multidimensional aspects of international}

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implementation of certain gendered subjectivities into the development doctrine, migrant women are said to be able to transform and modernize “patriarchal traditional gender regimes” in their countries of origin (Helmich, 2016, p. 94; de Winter, 2016, p. 182).

Therewith, the myth of women referred to as passive remittance receivers, in which males are to be seen as active remitters has rapidly come to change (Kunz, 2016, p. 213). As discovered also within the gender-development doctrine, new neoliberal identities have been formed – in which human agency is seen as the most sustainable practice within “smart economics” overall to serve the “fix-the-world” approach (Kunz, 2016, p. 217; Lavenex and Kunz, 2008, p. 442; Marchand, 2016, p. 191).

2.3.2 Gendered migration and the SDGs.

As mentioned previously, the development vocabulary of effectiveness, efficiency and impact assessment have become the key policy goals (and discourses) within the SDGs (Davids, Van Driel and Parren, 2014, p. 401f; Roberts, 2012, p. 100). Within the 2030 Agenda the approach of mainstreaming gender throughout all 17 goals is especially met regarding the goals linked with either economic growth and the labour market. Through the SDG 8 on “Decent Work and Economic Growth” the protection of labour rights and safe and secure working environments is to be achieved at all layers of implementation, in particular considering migrant women. In addition to goal 5 and 8, the interaction between women and migrant workers can be found in a number of goals and indicators (Holliday, Hennerbry and Gammage, 2019, p. 2553). Piper (2014) argues that the SDGs is the first international political agenda that goes beyond “the provision of safe and orderly migration pathways” to also address the lack of rights-based approaches, in which gender finally has been recognized as an important factor in migration. In stark contrast to the MDGs, which left out migration completely, the SDGs are taking outcomes of migratory processes into account (Bastia and Piper, 2019, p. 20). Moreover, at least 11 of these targets are relevant for migration (Likić-Brborić, 2019, p. 43), whereas all of them yet are interlinked in a larger cobweb in which migrant remittances are to be at the core foundation for succeeded progress. The most obvious goals linked with gendered migration, except goal 5 and 8 - is goal number 4 on “Quality education” including target 4.3 15 and 4.416 ; Goal number

15_{SDG Target 4.3: By 2030, ensure equal access for all women and men to affordable and quality technical, vocational and tertiary}

education, including university (UN, 2015).

16_{SDG Target 4.4: By 2030, substantially increase the number of youth and adults who have relevant skills, including technical and}

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10 on “Reduced inequalities”, including more or less all targets thereby 10.117, 10.2.18, 10.419, 10.720

and 10.c21 ; and lastly, goal 16 with target 16.222, and goal 17 with most targets (Holliday, Hennerbry

and Gammage, 2019, p. 2558).

However, regarding the IFIs focus on gendered remittances potential for poverty reduction and increased global health (goal 1, 2 and 3), as well women’s access to ownership of e.g. land (goal 15), improved technologies and infrastructures to improve financial services (goal 9), and increased – yet responsible (read household and community-serving) consumption (goal 12), the overall global development agenda have become tied with the financialization from remittances, no longer to be dependent upon aid and other official investments (SDGs, 2015a).

17_{SDG Target 10.1 By 2020, progressively achieve and sustain income growth of the bottom 40 per cent of the population at a rate}

higher than the national average (UN, 2015).

18_{10.2 By 2030, empower and promote the social, economic and political inclusion of all, irrespective of age, sex, disability, race,}

ethnicity, origin, religion or economic or other status (UN, 2015).

19_{10.4 Adopt policies, especially fiscal, wage and social protection policies, and progressively achieve greater equality (UN, 2015).} 20_{10.7 Facilitate orderly, safe, regular and responsible migration and mobility of people, including through the implementation of}

planned and well-managed migration policies (UN, 2015).

21_{10c By 2030, reduce to less than 3 per cent transaction costs of migrant remittances and eliminate remittance corridors with costs}

higher than 5 per cent (UN, 2015).

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3 Literature review

In the previous chapter, the emergence of gender and migration into development discourses was presented, along with an outline on the wobbly interrelation of optimism and pessimism alternately. Against this backdrop, I will now present the many shapes in which gendered migration channels and remittances have come to be viewed in dominant research. Firstly, by looking at social reproductive work within the transnational economy, in which women have come to be narrated as “co-breadwinners” for family- and community survival within global care chains. Secondly, I will address the linkage between this narrative and microfinance, pointing to how the role of gendered migration has come to change the agenda of impact investing’s. Finally, ending with research and fieldworks made to scrutinize the gendered global remittance trend.

3.1 Who cares?

“Have we entered a post-feminist paradigm?”, Lutz (2011) asks in her book The New Maids, Transnational Women and the Care Economy. Building upon Hochschild’s (2000a, 2000b) notion of “global care chains”, coined to demonstrate how economic inequalities between industrialized and pre-modern societies have abetted the commodification of emotional care work, Lutz (2011) is examining how the care industry has come to be one of the world’s largest femininized businesses. Moreover, Lutz (2011) is taking her point of departure within a European context, digging deeper into how western myths on modernism and gender equality operate on the basis of a gendered care- and migration regime, in which white middle-class women’s so-called “maternal roles” often are outsourced to migrant women across and beyond Europe – who is supposedly to be filling up the gaps left in the realm of reproductive work (Lutz, 2011, p. 27f). In other words, for women in richer countries to be de-commodified (or at least re-commodified) global care chains, “draining” poorer regions of emotional and reproductive work, has come to be viewed as the key feature perpetuating geopolitical inequalities within market privatizations (Lutz, 2011, p. 45). Ehrenreich and Hochschild (2003) are framing this systematic demographic imbalance as a “care vacuum” that migrant women tend to leave behind while taking over “duties” of women abroad.

Furthermore, Anderson (2000) writes that “the idea that there is an intimate relationship between the body, property and labour has proved crucial for Western political philosophy” (Anderson, 2000, p. 3). In other words, the “globalization of mothering” is built upon western nuclear family ideals, and are thus producing and reproducing “cleaners”, “nanny’s” and “servers” in the name of global social and economic sustainability (Anderson, 2000, p. 11; 149). Moreover, Anderson (2000) frames this doctrine of long-distance motherhood as the engine of capitalism, in which the 3C’s: Cleaning, Caring

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and Cooking, are to uphold the whole development apparatus. Migrant women are thus often narrated as “the victims” of the global economy, cleaning up the mess made by a privileged elite (Bastia and Piper, 2019, p. 25). However, Lutz (2011), in line with the general developmental discourses, argues the opposite, pointing at how migrant women rather has become co-breadwinners and thus are to challenge patriarchal role expectations, post-modern family patterns and mother-blaming attitudes by living transnational family life’s. Remittances, she argues, are key towards individual and collective equality (Lutz, 2011, p. 135; 148) and accordingly, Buff and Wöhl (2016, p. 5) write:

[…] the narrative of women cleaning up the financial mess left by men is profoundly misleading in the way it obscures the deeply gendered nature of state formations, capitalist economies, the crisis and responses to the crisis. [This] narrative only highlights one side of the problem, namely essentializing ‘women’ as a group, seemingly better to clean up the messy world of bankers’ permissive investments (p. 5)

Moreover, Lutz (2011) often states that kids pay the price of absent mothers and thus, the metaphor of “care-drain” – created as a parallel to the brain-drain doctrine – tends to get stuck in-between an ambiguous role of the western, heterosexual gender regime, in which all migrant women are portrayed as one homogenous group, to be seen as family mothers and as caring, reproductive figures (Dumitru, 2014, p. 204; Dumitru, 2016, p. 9). Most research within this field of study thereto tend to focus merely on women as caregivers, only valuing women’s migration by their performance or non-performance as co-breadwinning mothers (ibid). “This is methodological sexism!” Dumitri (2014; 2016) argues, and later on, I will come back to this statement. For now, however, just keep in mind how gender equality, on the one hand is to be depicted as something that only has been achieved in the industrialized west, yet, on the other hand is based on gendered migration from the so-called pre-modern east and south – in which maternal roles are outsourced in order for gender equality to be upheld. These gaps are not necessarily filled with low-skilled workers nor necessarily by caring absent mothers, yet certain ideas are put into certain frames to fit the overall damage. For now, keep in mind: how is western labour market to produce gendered migrant and non-migrant subjectivities?

3.2 Sippin’ on a Coca Cola

By now, it has been made clear that microfinance agendas combined with public-private partnerships (PPPs) has come to penetrate the overall business world, in which transnational business feminism (TBF) has emerged as a cure for the risk-taking, “testosterone-driven market-masculinity” (Eisenstein, 2017, p. 37; Prügl and True, 2014, p. 1138). By this time, we also know that it was by no coincidence that most of these PPP-programs was initiated with the unravelling of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), aiming to sell the empowerment of women and girls to the private sector (Prügl and True, 2014, p. 1145; Calcin, 2015, p. 302). Hence, a broad range of public institutions and companies have adopted gender mainstreaming policies with focus on the economic impact on gender equality, towards

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“all women’s financial inclusion” (Calcin, 2015, p. 300). Since predominant economic actors and development institutions have argued that women constitute world’s most underutilized development resource, even the Coca-Cola Company, in partnership with the UN, launched its 5by20 programme for women in the global south to embrace and empower themselves (Tornhill, 2019, p. 3).

In her research The Business of Women’s Empowerment: Looking into the Coca-Cola Company’s 5by20 programme, Tornhill (2019) is trying to render out the ways in which the 5by20 programme is operating, by “investigating the underlying assumptions and concrete manifestations of the proposed convergence between the interest of global corporations and those of women in precarious and marginalized economic positions” (Tornhill, 2019, p, 4; p. 58).

Whilst Coca-Colas own interests to double its business by 2020 has been well institutionalized in all layers of the project, such aim is yet based on women in poorer regions getting involved within the company’s global supply chain (Tornhill, 2019, p. 45). The main strategy then, has been to make these women self-employed and self-managed, in which Coca-Cola kindly have been offering its expertise, mentoring and training in business skills, as well as access to microloans and other financial services (Tornhill, 2019, p. 9). In other terms, women who, according to the Coca-Cola company, are seeking to improve their family and community lives, have become the “perfect neoliberal subjects for capitalist expansion” as recyclers, but mainly as retailers “running small kiosks, or operate ships or eateries from their homes” selling Coca-Cola drinks (Tornhill, 2019, p. 11). Put differently, some women are to pull themselves out of poverty by means of business training (Tornhill, 2019, p. 26). What Tornhill (2019) found, however, was that these microcredit initiatives more often contributed to, and resulted in, increased vulnerabilities and escalating debt spirals (Tornhill, 2019, p. 121). Without any formalized relationship with the company, many of the women ended up in even worse positions in which debt-based financing enforced continued entrepreneurships as a vicious circle (Tornhill, 2019, p. 127). Similar experiences are to be found e.g. within the so-called “Project Shakti” in India 2005, that were aiming to give rural women microcredits and business training to become micro-distributors of HUL consumer goods, such as soaps, detergents, and cosmetics by door-to-door selling (Sato, 2016, p. 157). However, instead of becoming empowered, women ended up being hyper-exploited by these PPPs, sucked into roles at the bottom of the global market without being able to pay back their debts (Sato, 2016, p. 158). So, what Tornhill (2019) pinpoints in her study, is the paradox in which these business training programmes dedicatedly are working to disguise its toxic microfinance traps in agendas on the one hand seeking to expensively sell women the tools to embrace themselves economically, but also, on the other hand, are selling the vision of how these migrant- and non-migrant women are to be saved my market integration as a way to challenge local patriarchal relations (Tornhill, 2019, p. 34). Equality, in other terms, is defined and equated with women’s

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abandonment of their homes, in which their reproductive and productive work is measured by capitalist profit accumulation (Tornhill, 2019, p. 59; p. 140).

3.3 Diaspora as a brain bank

As mentioned initially, little research has been made within the field of gendered migration, remittances and development. Nevertheless, the most topical work to be consumed within this thesis, is Kunz (2011) research The Political Economy of Global Remittances – Gender, Governmentality and Neoliberalism. In her study, Kunz (2011) is examining the Tres por Uno Programme23 that is an

initiative giving migrants in Mexico the opportunity to channel their resources into works of social impact. Through the question: “How does the Global Remittance Trend (GRT) manifest itself in the international realm and in the context of Mexico?, Kunz (2011) analyses how the discourses around remittances has created two main populations in rural areas: those of remittance providers (often said to be men) and those of remittance receivers (often said to be women). What Kunz (2011) founds, however, is that in many of the traditional, male-breadwinner heterosexual coupled households, these indoctrinated discourses are to be challenged as both men and women always have been sharing the task of productive and reproductive work. Therefore, the question arising throughout the study is how such stereotypical view yet has come to dominate the whole developed- and underdeveloped apparatus, and how remittances perpetuate backwardness of migrant hometowns by increasing patterns of dependency (Kunz, 2011, p. 70).

Moreover, Kunz (2011) is trying to look beyond such heteronormative agenda within the remittance initiatives, showing how migration can result in totally different outcomes than depicted within the Tres por Uno Programme, among other PPPs (Kunz, 2011, p. 54). As an example, she addresses that many households do not conform to these gender norms, but to a diversity of social constructions, including single parents and other extended family arrangements. Children thereto play an important role in providing social reproduction (Kunz, 2011, p. 50) and therefore Kunz argues that the overall relationship between domestic work and global restructuring has come to be strengthened by certain patriarchal gender conceptions – yet to be challenged within the communities in which migrant development initiatives operate (Kunz, 2011, p. 76).

Moreover, the main argument throughout the study, and in turn the most interesting contribution for this study, is nevertheless that there are two dominant international competing discourses underlying the Tres Por Uno Programme: the rights-based discourse and the monetary-based (Kunz, 2011, p. 40).

23_{The Tres por Uno Programme (3x1 program) supports the initiatives of Mexican living abroad and gives them the opportunity to}

channel their resource into works of social impacts that directly benefit their home communities in Mexico. For every peso sent by migrants, the Federal, State and Municipal governments add 3 pesos each (Marchand, 2016, p. 193).

Banking the unbanked: Financial inclusion and economic sustainable development for women? : Decolonial perspectives on the gendered migration-remittances-development nexus