Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Microfinance and Democratic Engagement

This paper presents results from a study of the comparative effects of microfinance group lending, and individual lending technologies on measures of women's political capital in a fragile conflict-affected setting. Based on a quasi-experiment in Liberia, the two lending technologies were found to have significant effects on different measures of women's political capital, though the effects were greater for the group lending technology than those of the individual lending. The different effects are due to the program orientation of the two lending technologies which facilitate the development of more resources for communal activism and democratic values among group lending than individual lending borrowers. This impact of this effect will be minimal if factors that constrain the women's ability to invest their political capital are not addressed. Although more evidence would be required in order to generalize these results, they provide us insights about the political contribution of an economic intervention to post-conflict reconstruction.