Social entrepreneurship between earning a living and emancipation: impact of microfinance on people with disabilities in Kenya

Yvonne Wechuli, Sellah Lusweti, Halimu Shauri and Elisabeth Wacker

Chapter 66 in Research Handbook on Disability Policy, 2023, pp 773-788 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) grants the rights to work (Article 27) and an adequate living standard (Article 28). However, most of the global workforce earns a living in the informal sector, where recruitment and safety are unregulated and no formal education certificates are required. So-called livelihood promotion programmes seek to foster such informal (self-)employment for the sake of financial and social empowerment. Promoted as a key measure of poverty alleviation in the Global South, livelihood promotion, often in the form of microfinance schemes, is made available to people with disabilities in mainstreamed or disability-specific programmes. Yet, microfinance is critiqued as lacking evidence for its impact on beneficiaries or the national economy and - from a human rights perspective - for its neoliberal logic that individualizes the risk of poverty. This chapter explores lessons learnt on how to assess the social impact of livelihood promotion.

Keywords: Development Studies; Economics and Finance; Research Methods; Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/view/edcoll/9781800373655/9781800373655.00076.xml (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Temporarily Unavailable

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:elg:eechap:20096_66

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Darrel McCalla ().