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Microcredit Deserves Support, not Suppression

Owing to its innovative program design and practices, microcredit reaches many poor people who lack access to formal finance. This is clearly a major gain that protects the poor and other disadvantaged groups from resorting to informal loans at extortionate rates.

Two Cautionary Tales from Bangladesh

For leaders who devised Bangladeshi’s microfinance miracle in the first place, adjusting staff instructions and realigning incentives to remove these foolish practices should be a piece of cake.

Over-indebtedness: A Practitioner’s Perspective

The large MFIs seem to be revising down their growth targets, there are ongoing experiments with new products and there is some hope that a microcredit bureau, at least on a limited scale, will see the light of day within a year or so.

Getting Beyond Payments

Most branchless banking services help clients move money over distance : a money transfer to a family member in the countryside, a bill payment to the utility company, a social benefit from the government.

Branchless Banking 2010: What Price?

Is branchless banking cheaper than traditional banking, and by how much?

Branchless Banking 2010: Is the Hype Justified?

After several years of very high profile attention on mobile money and other branchless banking schemes, we think it’s time to test the hype. Or more accurately, we’ve wanted to for awhile.

What's the Impact of Loan Size in Microfinance?

People tend to see loan size as a rough proxy of client poverty, which appears to be more or less true as long as you say the word “rough” very emphatically.

All about Where the Curves Meet

The basic challenge in both micro and SME finance is that it costs more in absolute terms to lend a given amount in a number of small loans rather than one big loan, especially when it comes to those household and enterprise loans where approval decisions can’t be based on automatic scoring.