The Entrepreneurial Woman in Development Programs: Thinking Through Class Differences

This article explores development programs that focus on women’s entrepreneurship with the aim to promote women’s empowerment and gender equality, on the one hand, and household poverty reduction and economic growth, on the other. Utilizing a case study from Turkey, it studies the class-based contradictions inherent in the idea of the “entrepreneurial woman.” The first contradiction lies between the imaginary of the “entrepreneurial woman,” which guides the way in which the programs are devised, and the actual women targeted. This plays out in the difference between the actual resources women can deploy for their economic activities and what is expected of them. A second class tension involves the liminal position of the local NGO officers between the donors and the beneficiaries. Their efforts to sustain their distinction from the latter make the logic of the programs appear to work. This article proposes that these tensions offer insights into the problems concerning the rationalities of development programs, as well as the everyday mechanisms that enable their continued existence.