Microfinance
The Business of Poverty: How Low-Income Credit is Dangerous
BusinessWeek recently ran a cover story on The Poverty Business: Inside U.S. companies audacious drive to extract more profit from the nation’s working poor. This is not a publication that has said much against microfinance, yet if a case had to be made against our unbridled enthusiasm for it, the lead story would serve very [...]
Evaluating Microfinance: CGD, IPA and other experiments
The CGD has a bunch of reports evaluating the impact of microfinance. The initiative is led by David Roodman, who authored the Microfinance as Business report (previously covered here). The article explains how their assessments are different: Understanding how microfinance affects clients is not straightforward because there are several possible explanations for why, say, a [...]
A Talk by Mohammad Yunus: A Man Misunderstood
Today I heard a speech by Mohammad Yunus at FICCI (Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry) in New Delhi. He spoke for 35 minutes to a packed, standing crowd, interrupted only by the laughter of his jokes and the occasional rude cellphone. I am compelled to write this (long) post, because I must [...]
Financial Inclusion in India: Trends Beyond Microfinance
Contrary to popular belief the reach of microfinance in India remains limited. Both market and policy reforms are necessary in order to correct this, expand microcredit, and sustain it through deposit growth. The resulting industry and policy moves may prove important for other countries on a similar trajectory.
Marrying Microfinance with Microinsurance: Increasing Impact
Microfinance seems to be about smoothing consumption and expenditure patterns. By protecting the poor from catastrophic loss, however, microfinance by definition prevents customers from slipping into an abyss of poverty that they cannot hope to climb out of.
Microfinance: Not a Development Tool, Then What?
I came across an interesting, and contrarian view on the Nobel Peace prize of 2006. Richard Posner writes on the Gary & Posner Blog, questioning the real link between poverty and peace. While his criticism of the Peace Prize itself is slight, Posner presents some new arguments against microfinance, to explain why ‘It may simply [...]
Microfinance has Limited Impact
The Times of India reports that microfinance has limited development impact: The End of Poverty (16 Dec 2006). Many studies show that the impact of microcredit is limited. Vijay Mahajan, founder of Basix, India’s best-known MFI, has the following to say: “In an impact assessment study carried out at Basix six years after inception, we [...]
Microfinance as Business, Faults and All
I have been a long-time skeptic of Microfinance and my posts on the subject receive more than average traffic for this modest blog. I am disappointed, therefore, to have missed a CGD report titled “Microfinance as Business“, that seems to support, at first, my skepticism. The CGD points to coverage of the report in Salon. [...]
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