In 2007, the microfinance market served more than 33 million borrowers and 48 million savers. Statistics provided by Unitus, an organization devoted toward fighting global poverty show that 80% of the potential market has not yet been reached. How will the worldwide growth of this market impact you?
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Despite the hoopla over microfinance, it doesn’t cure poverty. But stable jobs do. If societies are serious about helping the poorest of the poor, they should stop investing in microfinance and start supporting large, labor-intensive industries. At the same time, governments must hold up their end of the deal, for market-based solutions will never be enough
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Critics of microfinance institutions (MFIs) ask them to choose between helping the poor or making money for investors, but this is a false choice. MFIs can have their impact and profit, too, says the author, the CEO of the Grameen Foundation. He sketches a new vision of microfinance as a platform, not a product; one that relies on high volumes, not high margins, and that uses limits on private benefit, holistic performance standards, and third-party certification to help MFIs meet both their bot more...
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Microcredit, the innovative financial tool that provides very small business loans to poor people, is moving into adolescence and must wean itself off non-profit donors to become an established part of the global capital structure, according to Wharton faculty and experts in microfinance.
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In the debate over whether microfinance works, few microfinance institutions articulate what, exactly, their ultimate goals are and how, exactly, they will achieve them. The authors cut through the confusion by mapping a clear theory of change for microfinance. If the goal of microfinance is to alleviate poverty, they say, then MFIs should focus on helping their clients build successful enterprises, rather than on making more and bigger loans.
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There is no better time for a serious discussion of how the law and lawyers can enable the poor to help themselves—throughout the world, and especially in the United States.
Right now, highly regulated banks in the developed world (many of them in the United States) are having trouble pricing and trading complex mortgage-backed securities. At the same time, how¬ever, trust-based microfinance banks like Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank continue to do well, unaffected by the financial uncertainty more...
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The Grameen Bank is based on the voluntary formation of small groups of five people to provide mutual, morally binding group guarantees in lieu of the collateral required by conventional banks. At first only two members of a group are allowed to apply for a loan. Depending on their performance in repayment the next two borrowers can then apply and, subsequently, the fifth member as well.
The assumption is that if individual borrowers are given access to credit, they will be able to identify more...
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