Post-pandemic Poverty: Debt and the Feminisation of Finance in Marginal Sites

In many parts of Latin America, expansion of consumer credit to the poor is promoted by policies of poverty alleviation and financial inclusion but at times also austerity policies reducing social security benefits. This expansion is marked by a growing emphasis on targeting women for unsecured subprime lending, which is occurring globally and has been coined the "feminisation of finance". It is crucial to understand the intricate relationship between poverty, debt, digital finance, and gender inequality, especially in the current global context, where women have been disproportionately affected by the Covid pandemic.

This project aims to examine the gendered impact of debt and new conditions of poverty, resulting from increased reliance on credit during economic crises and its aftermath and facilitated by data driven financial technologies in Latin America, where many low-income households rely on women to shoulder the primary caregiving responsibilities.

These challenges have been accelerated by deregulation and new financial technologies including algorithmic credit assessments. The project will focus on Brazil and Chile, where the project will investigate ethnographically the two sides of creditworthiness: the experiences of poor women managing their debt and striving to establish or maintain their creditworthiness, and the financial institutions offering credit and determining individuals' creditworthiness through data-driven technologies such as algorithmic scoring models.

The ongoing expansion of credit for the poor and advancement of financial technologies makes these countries critical sites for studying the new frontiers of fringe finance. The project expands the concept of extractivism to critical studies of data and financialisation and investigates data extractivism in Latin America to theorise women’s encounters with digital finance, seeing as their consumer data and debt is commodified by corporate financial actors.

The project runs from 2023-2025. It is funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF), Humanities Council and the Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS).

Marie Kolling
Anthropologist and senior researcher, DIIS  

José Ossandón 
Sociologist and associate professor at CBS

Thaíse Sá Santos
Research assistant

Anna Clara Pereira Soares
Research assistant

Juliana Alcantara
Research assistant