CLAUDINE
BY JOHN BERRY
Third World Cinema, 1974

It has been well over a decade since welfare was a major political issue, regularly debated in public policy arenas and the media—and used as a wedge issue by Democrats and Republicans alike. But with an organized white mob movement called the Tea Party, who cloak a project of reasserting white national/global authority underneath a call for states’ rights and fiscal prudence, and the 1996 Welfare Reform Act coming up for re-authorization this year, we are bound to hear more rhetoric about welfare's validity and the need to forcibly compel more Black women into “appropriate” and “responsible” work, sexual, and reproductive behaviors.

Great organizing campaigns are like great love affairs. You begin to see life through a different lens. You change in unexpected ways. You lose sleep, but you also feel boundless energy. You develop new relationships and new interests. Your skin becomes more open to the world around you. Life feels different, and it’s almost like you’ve been reborn. And, most importantly, you begin to feel things that you previously couldn’t have even imagined are possible. 

Touted as the solution to women’s poverty, microfinance is anything but. Often it is a trap where vulnerable women become mired and indebted in an economic system in which they cannot compete. Former “development” worker Maria Diarra of Mali talks here about the problems of microfinance and offers alternative solutions.

The thing that makes me scared is micro-credit. People think that cash is the only way to get out of poverty, and the only place to get cash is micro-credit because the bankers only give to the rich. When the micro-credit industry first came to Mali, the programs spoke of fighting poverty, but that’s not what they’re doing.