Compounding crises of social reproduction: Microfinance, over-indebtedness and the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

Highlights Reliance on microfinance for everyday survival will be deepened by the COVID-19 pandemic. The majority of microfinance borrowers globally are women. Servicing microfinance loans will heighten burdens of (un)-paid work that women undertake as part of social reproduction. Over-indebtedness leads to women’s bodily and emotional ‘depletion’. The global public health crisis of COVID-19 represents a major challenge to gender equality and sustainable development.

Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) Pollution Monitoring with Sentinel-5P Satellite Imagery over Europe during the Coronavirus Pandemic Outbreak

“…TROPOMI data are still evaluated by scientists and engineers, and new challenges opened new opportunities in Earth Observation. One of them is the dramatic COVID-19 outbreak, which started in February to March 2020, as an unprecedented situation for society and economy, from the global level [93] down to regional, local, and even individual ones [94]. Beyond the public health system difficulties and disasters around the world, economic activities and traffic adapted to the new context of the temporary closing of businesses, educational facilities, plants and factories, traffic restrictions, etc., leading to an abrupt change in economic evolution [95], with a profound impact on financial markets [96,97], from the oil prices and banking sector decrease to the reduction of the ability of different state authorities to provide a normal and efficient economic and social system management as well as to the maintenance of vital infrastructures.…”

Climate change, COVID-19, and the co-production of injustices: a feminist reading of overlapping crises

“…Disposability of precarious workforce, often occupied by women and gender minorities, meant increasing vulnerability to pandemic shocks and increasing household economic insecurity. Similarly, inabilities to pay back microfinance loans due to pandemic economy impacted vast numbers of women in the developing world, compounding poverty (Brickell et al, 2020). At the same time, gendered impacts of climate-fueled disasters and post-disaster recovery (or lack thereof) demonstrated increased job losses for men and women, but with increased distress sale of women's assets (such jewelry), greater incidences of gender-based violence, and unequal gendered health-related burdens, food and water insecurity, and overall compounding impoverishment (UN Women & UNEP, 2020).…”

Insights for a post-pandemic world

“…The GDP of the Philippines was expected to shrink 9.0% in 2020 (OECD 2021); the economies of Malaysia and Thailand have been severely affected too. The global economic downturn and travel restrictions had pervasive impacts on everyday life, as reported in scholarship on garment workers (Lawreniuk 2020), microfinance borrowers (Brickell et al 2020), and tourism operators (Do et al 2021;Foo et al 2020), for example. Second, as we conclude the writing of this chapter in June 2021, the identification of new clusters and the spread of more transmissible variants of the virus -partly attributable to recent festivals and the entry of infected foreigners -has been straining healthcare resources and causing worry in scantly vaccinated areas of continental Southeast Asia that had hitherto been able to avoid being host to major outbreaks (The Economist 2021a) (see Figures 1.1 and 1.2).…”