When the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus in 2006 for his concept of microfinance, it brought what began as a local policy experiment in the 1970s to global attention…
Street vendors are the most visible of the people who work in the informal sector – up to half the urban workforce in cities like Manila – but whose needs and rights receive no official recognition.
If programs don’t challenge the structural causes of gender inequality, microfinance will just continue to reinforce poverty and inequality.
Give a man the means to borrow, so the argument goes, and he can work himself out of poverty. But do microfinances’ claims stand up?
wk1003mike/Shutterstock
Small loans from governments and philanthropists are often held up as a route out of poverty. But proper research into whether they work is thin on the ground.
Grameen Bank has potential to increase financial inclusion in Australia but regulation is holding it back.
The first microloans were made to women in rural Bangladesh in the 1970s. Banesa Khatun (far left) here in 2006, was still using Grameen Bank 30 years later.
Rafiquar Rahman/Reuters
The global push for financial inclusion could end up with unintended consequences.
Informal traders at Cape Town ‘s Grand Parade. Survival businesses that are here today and gone tomorrow cannot further long term devemlopment.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
After 1994 the microcredit movement helped plunge large numbers of black South Africans into heavy debt and poverty while enriching a few white elites who provided the loans.
Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank. The micro credit revolution he started has not been a panacea for poverty.
EPA/Ulrich Perrey
Microcredit, which was viewed as a perfect market-affirming solution to poverty in developing countries, has collapsed. In 30 years it’s gone from Zorro to Zombie.
Small business owners, such as this vendor in Cape Town, need access to affordable micro loans.
Reuters/Mike Hutchings
At this time of the year, our mailboxes and inboxes get flooded with Christmas appeals. Many of them feature heart-wrenching and guilt-inducing images of people in need, the idea being that they tug at…
Squaring the circle. A microfinance self help group meet in a village near Pune, Maharashtra.
Oxfam Australia
The introduction of hard-nosed private sector investment and the age-old pressures of social norms mean microfinance institutions are at risk of losing their social conscience – and both clients and staff…
Microfinance can buy you a bucket, but it won’t feed you forever.
DFAT
In 1976, a small experiment was conducted in the poverty-stricken and flood ravaged Bangladeshi village of Jobra. Professor Muhammad Yunus, a lecturer of Economics at Chittagong University visited the…
Senior Lecturer, School of Archaeology and Anthropology; Director, Australian National Centre for Latin American Studies, Australian National University