Microfinance was hailed as a way to change the lives of hundreds of millions of people without access to credit. It worked so well that Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus was awarded a Nobel Prize. But then, banks jumped in to get in on the profits. To manage high debt levels, Cambodians are migrating for work, eating less and even pulling their children out of school.
The “gig” economy was only ever really set up to exploit the poor and desperate, but at the same time these people need those incomes or those second jobs doing stuff like Uber and door dash and other micro-economy jobs.
It’s really tough to be poor, uneducated, and untrained in modern society because you just get crushed by forces so far beyond your control and you are so far below those forces notice that they hardly care beyond their desires to exploit you.
Microfinance is not the same thing as the gig economy.
I get the differences, but there are similarities, microfinance is just the banking world’s version of the gig economy, still predatory in nature, still exploiting the poor under the guise of helping the poor.