Mara Kardas-Nelson in Conversation with Alex Park: We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky

Join Mesa alums Mara Kardas-Nelson and Alex Park as they discuss Mara’s new book, We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky: The Seductive Promise of Microfinance. 

We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky (forthcoming June 11, 2024 from Metropolitan Books/Holt) is a deeply reported work of journalism that explores the promises and perils of microfinance, told through the eyes of international lenders and women borrowers in West Africa.

In the mid-1970s, Muhammad Yunus, an American trained Bangladeshi economist, met a poor female stool maker who needed money to expand her business. In an act widely known as the beginning of microfinance, Yunus lent $27 to forty-two women, hoping small credit would help the women pull themselves out of poverty. Soon, Yunus’s Grameen Bank was born, and the idea of giving very small, high-interest loans to poor people took off. In 2006, Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to create economic and social development from below.”

But there’s a problem with this story. There are mounting concerns that these small loans are as likely to bury poor people in debt as they are to pull them from poverty, with borrowers from India to Kenya facing consequences such as jail time and forced land sales. Reportedly hundreds have even committed suicide.

What happened? Did microfinance take a wrong turn, or was it flawed from the beginning?

We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky is about unintended consequences, blind optimism, and the decades-long ramifications of seemingly small policy choices. The book is rooted in the stories of women borrowers in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Their narratives, woven through a deep history of modern international development, are set against the rise of Yunus’s vision that tiny loans would “put poverty in museums.” Kardas-Nelson asks: What is missed with a single, financially focused solution to global inequity that ignores the real drivers of poverty? Who stands to benefit and, more important, who gets left behind?

Mara Kardas-Nelson is a freelance journalist focusing on inequality, international development, and the environment. Her award-winning work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Reveal, Insider, NPR, The Nation, and elsewhere. Mara also has a background in global health; her time living and working in different parts of the world informs the stories that she tells, and how she tells them. She was a Human Rights Center Fellow at Mesa in 2022.

Alex Park is a journalist and researcher with an interest in the evolution of global systems of trade, finance, and agriculture. His work has been published in The New Republic, Mother Jones, Al Jazeera, and many other publications. He was a Michael Pollan Journalism Fellow at Mesa Refuge in 2018, and currently serves on Mesa’s Board of Directors. Find out more about him on his website.

Co-presented with Point Reyes Books. Held in the Dance Palace Church Space in Point Reyes Station.

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