EXITING POVERTY THROUGH SELF-EMPLOYMENT: THE GRAMEEN MODEL AND ROTATING CREDIT ASSOCIATIONS AS ALTERNATIVE STRATEGIES

Ivan Light ()
Additional contact information
Ivan Light: Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, USA

Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (JDE), 2021, vol. 26, issue 02, 1-17

Abstract: Self-employment in the informal sector keeps poor people alive, but it rarely enables them to exit poverty. To exit poverty through self-employment, poor people require monetary and non-monetary resources which they overwhelmingly lack. To escape this dilemma, the owners of survivalist business firms need to band together in order to assemble a minimal resource base on the strength of which they can together upgrade their partnership. Because resources are scarce in poverty populations, this task is exceptionally hard to accomplish. Rotating credit and savings associations (ROSCAs) can enable individuals to exit poverty through self-employment, but ROSCAs only work in the most-resourced, upper tier of a poverty population. In the lower tier, Grameen model banks inject organizational, educational, and financial resources that enable impoverished individuals to exit poverty by upgrading a survivalist business.

Keywords: Grameen model; financing; informal sector; ROSCA; self-employment; survivalist business (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/S1084946721500126
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wsi:jdexxx:v:26:y:2021:i:02:n:s1084946721500126

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from

DOI: 10.1142/S1084946721500126

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (JDE) is currently edited by Peter Koveos

More articles in Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (JDE) from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().