Searching: 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.

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.

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.

The Role of Governments in Microfinance

Understanding the limited but constructive role governments can play in building financial systems is key to ensuring poor people's permanent access to quality financial services. This Donor Brief explains how experienced donors can support governments to develop sound policy frameworks and encourage vibrant and competitive microfinance, rather than directly providing financial services.

How Donors Can Help Build Pro-Poor Financial Systems

This Donor Brief outlines a practical way that donors can work, individually or on collaboration, to support pro-poor financial systems that ensure permanent access to financial services for significant numbers of poor people.

Financial Services for the Rural Poor

This Donor Brief clarifies the confusing terminology related to rural finance and identifies the main constraints to financial services in rural areas. It also pinpoints specific issues donor agencies face internally to effectively support financial services for the rural poor and offers helpful guidance.

Microfinance and HIV/AIDS

This Donor Brief addresses how microfinance can play a role in helping families affected by HIV/AIDS and how microfinance institutions can plan for the institutional risk posed by this epidemic.