Social entrepreneurship between earning a living and emancipation: impact of microfinance on people with disabilities in Kenya

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD) grants the rights to work (Article 27) and an adequate living standard (Article 28). However, most of the global workforce earns a living in the informal sector, where recruitment and safety are unregulated and no formal education certificates are required. So-called livelihood promotion programmes seek to foster such informal (self-)employment for the sake of financial and social empowerment. Promoted as a key measure of poverty alleviation in the Global South, livelihood promotion, often in the form of microfinance schemes, is made available to people with disabilities in mainstreamed or disability-specific programmes. Yet, microfinance is critiqued as lacking evidence for its impact on beneficiaries or the national economy and - from a human rights perspective - for its neoliberal logic that individualizes the risk of poverty. This chapter explores lessons learnt on how to assess the social impact of livelihood promotion.