Research & Analysis

Building Capacity for Retail Microfinance

This Donor Brief addresses how funding agencies -- public donors, international NGOs, private foundations, and investors -- can help meet the challenge of developing retail capacity.

Protecting Microfinance Borrowers

Around the world, the microfinance community is paying more attention to consumer protection. Controversial topics, such as high interest rates and the overindebtedness of borrowers, have raised public concern for poor consumers in countries far and wide, from Bolivia to Bangladesh to South Africa and beyond. Yet relatively little is known about how consumer protection might apply to financial services for the poor.

Managing Risks and Designing Products for Agricultural Microfinance

This Occasional Paper offers a model for providing financial services to poor, rural farming households that combines the most relevant and promising features of traditional microfinance, traditional agricultural finance, and other approaches.

Funding Microfinance Technology

This Donor Brief offers guidance on how to ensure microfinance providers follow good investment and management principles when choosing and implementing new technologies.

Crafting a Money Transfers Strategy

This Occasional Paper explores operational and strategic considerations involved in launching a money transfer product. Financial service providers that cater to the poor have been drawn to the money transfer market because it offers them the opportunity to fulfill their financial goals as well as their social objectives.

Maximizing Aid Effectiveness in Microfinance

This Donor Brief covers five key elements to improving the way in which development assistance agencies and other funders support financial systems for the poor.

Sustaining Microfinance in Post-Tsunami Asia

This Brief presents guidelines intended to help MFIs provide the appropriate range of emergency and longer term assistance to their clients, while helping both MFIs and donors ensure the ultimate mission of the MFI--to be a sustainable provider of financial services--is not compromised.

Developing Deposit Services for the Poor

These guidelines embody the working consensus of CGAP donor members on how donors can support deposit services in microfinance.

Supporting Microfinance in Conflict-Affected Areas

This Donor Brief addresses how supporting microfinance in devastated and fragile communities can be successful when donors work in concert, select qualified partners, are patient, are willing to take risks, and are prepared to pay higher costs.

Interest Rate Ceilings and Microfinance: The Story So Far

This Occasional Paper outlines the rationale for higher microcredit interest rates, the historical performance of subsidized lending, and the impact of interest rate ceilings on microfinance clients. It includes recommendations for fostering lower microcredit interest rates through competition and consumer protection without imposing interest rate ceilings.