Research & Analysis

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.

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.

Housing Microfinance

By applying good microfinance practice to housing finance, a range of financial institutions are beginning to offer much-needed housing finance services to low-income people. This Donor Brief outlines how donors can support these institutions and expand sustainable housing finance.

What Is a Network? The Diversity of Networks in Microfinance Today

Throughout the development of the microfinance industry, network support organizations (NSOs) have played a critical role in launching new institutions, developing standards, wholesaling funds, providing technical services, implementing knowledge management, and leading policy reform efforts.

Financial Institutions with a Double Bottom Line

This Occasional Paper summarizes the results of CGAP's survey of the global outreach of a broad set of institutions that extend financial services downward -- institutions with a "double bottom line" of financial and social/development objectives. The survey found that over 750 million accounts exist below the traditional level of commercial banks and that a substantial fraction of these predominantly savings accounts probably belong to the poor or near poor -- and represent an important opportunity for outreach.