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Book Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic

Download or read book Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic written by Hugh Sinclair and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2012-07-09 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Microfinance insider Hugh Sinclair weaves a shocking tale of an industry focused on maximizing profits and plagued by predatory lending practices, scandals, cover-ups and corruption.

Book Small Money Big Impact

Download or read book Small Money Big Impact written by Peter A. Fanconi and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Make your money make a difference—and enjoy attractive returns Small Money, Big Impact explores and explains the globally growing importance of impact investing. Today, the investor's perspective has become as important as the actual social impact. Based on their experience with over 25 million micro borrowers, the authors delve into the mechanics, considerations, data and strategies that make microloans and impact investing an attractive asset class. From the World Bank to the individual investor, impact investing is attracting more and more attention. Impact investing is a global megatrend and is reshaping the way people invest as pension funds, insurance companies, foundations, family offices and private investors jump on board. This book explains for the first time how it works, why it works and what you should know if you're ready to help change the world. Impact investing has proven over the last 20 years as the first-line offense against crushing poverty. Over two billion people still lack access to basic financial services, which are essential for improving their livelihood. Investors have experienced not only social and environmental impact, but have received attractive, stable and uncorrelated returns for over 15 years. This guide provides the latest insights and methodologies that help you reap the rewards of investing in humanity. Explore the global impact investing phenomenon Learn how microloans work, and how they make a difference Discover why investors are increasingly leaning into impact investing Consider the factors that inform impact investing decisions Part social movement and part financial strategy, impact investing offers the unique opportunity for investors to power tremendous change with a small amount of money— expanding their portfolios as they expand their own global impact. Microfinance allows investors at any level to step in where banks refuse to tread, offering opportunity to those who need it most. Small Money, Big Impact provides the expert guidance you need to optimize the impact on your portfolio and the world.

Book Confessions of a Bible Thumper

Download or read book Confessions of a Bible Thumper written by Michael Camp and published by Engage Faith. This book was released on 2012-06 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What happens when a devout religious conservative questions his own evangelical traditions using the Socratic principle, and follows where the evidence leads? ... This brutally honest personal pilgrimage challenges and encourages readers to rethink all things sacred and embrace a faith full of grace and reason.

Book The International Bank of Bob

Download or read book The International Bank of Bob written by Bob Harris and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-03-05 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how the author was compelled to help the world's working poor, describing how he discovered the Kiva.org micro-loan portal and his visits to world regions where the organization's loans have enabled people and small businesses to revitalize.

Book Microfinance Institutions

Download or read book Microfinance Institutions written by R. Mersland and published by Springer. This book was released on 2015-12-11 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on MFI performance is still in its infancy. MFIs are hybrid organizations with dual objectives. Performance studies in microfinance are therefore less straightforward compared to performance studies in traditional banking research. This book contains new MFI performance research by top scholars from across the globe.

Book A World of Three Zeros

Download or read book A World of Three Zeros written by Muhammad Yunus and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2017-09-26 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A winner of the Nobel Peace Prize and bestselling author of Banker to the Poor offers his vision of an emerging new economic system that can save humankind and the planet Muhammad Yunus, who created microcredit, invented social business, and earned a Nobel Peace Prize for his work in alleviating poverty, is one of today's most trenchant social critics. Now he declares it's time to admit that the capitalist engine is broken -- that in its current form it inevitably leads to rampant inequality, massive unemployment, and environmental destruction. We need a new economic system that unleashes altruism as a creative force just as powerful as self-interest. Is this a pipe dream? Not at all. In the last decade, thousands of people and organizations have already embraced Yunus's vision of a new form of capitalism, launching innovative social businesses designed to serve human needs rather than accumulate wealth. They are bringing solar energy to millions of homes in Bangladesh; turning thousands of unemployed young people into entrepreneurs through equity investments; financing female-owned businesses in cities across the United States; bringing mobility, shelter, and other services to the rural poor in France; and creating a global support network to help young entrepreneurs launch their start-ups. In A World of Three Zeros, Yunus describes the new civilization emerging from the economic experiments his work has helped to inspire. He explains how global companies like McCain, Renault, Essilor, and Danone got involved with this new economic model through their own social action groups, describes the ingenious new financial tools now funding social businesses, and sketches the legal and regulatory changes needed to jumpstart the next wave of socially driven innovations. And he invites young people, business and political leaders, and ordinary citizens to join the movement and help create the better world we all dream of.

Book Chile  The Carretera Austral

Download or read book Chile The Carretera Austral written by Hugh Sinclair and published by Bradt Travel Guides. This book was released on 2015-12-18 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chile: Carretera Austral Travel Guide - Travel advice and expert holiday tips featuring Ruta 7 and Coyhaique highlights, natural history and wildlife. This guide also covers suggested itineraries and tour operators, driving and hiking, Caleta Tortel, Villa O'Higgins, Puerto Montt, national parks like Queulat, Hornopirén and Laguna San Rafael.

Book Handbook on Ethics in Finance

Download or read book Handbook on Ethics in Finance written by Leire San-Jose and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 600 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Book The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty written by David Brady and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 937 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Handbook of the Social Science of Poverty builds a common scholarly ground in the study of poverty by bringing together an international, inter-disciplinary group of scholars to provide their perspectives on the issue. Contributors engage in discussions about the leading theories and conceptual debates regarding poverty, the most salient topics in poverty research, and the far-reaching consequences of poverty on the individual and societal level.

Book Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic

Download or read book Confessions of a Microfinance Heretic written by Hugh Sinclair and published by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. This book was released on 2012-07-09 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This memoir by a microfinance insider “is essential reading for anyone interested in development economics, a disturbing and yet ultimately hopeful exposé” (John Perkins, New York Times bestselling author of Confessions of an Economic Hitman). This is the account of a microfinance true believer whose decade in the industry turned him into a heretic. Working with several microfinance institutions around the world, Hugh Sinclair realized that the $70 billion industry wasn’t doing much to help the people it claimed to serve. In fact, exorbitant interest rates led borrowers into never-ending debt spirals, and aggressive collection practices resulted in cases of forced prostitution, child labor, suicide, and nationwide revolts against the microfinance community. Sinclair weaves a shocking tale of a system increasingly focused on maximizing profits—particularly once large banks got involved. He details his discovery of several scandals, one of the most disturbing involving a large African microfinance institution of questionable legality that charged interest rates in excess of one hundred percent per year and whose investors and supporters included some of the most celebrated leaders of the microfinance sector. Sinclair’s objections were first met with silence, then threats, attempted bribery, and a court case, and eventually led him to become a principal whistleblower in a sector that had lost its soul. Microfinance can work—Sinclair describes moving experiences with several ethical and effective organizations and explains what made them different. But without the fundamental reforms that Sinclair recommends here, microfinance will remain an “investment opportunity” that will leave the poor with hollow promises and empty pockets.

Book The Political Economy of Microfinance

Download or read book The Political Economy of Microfinance written by Philip Mader and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to the author, rather than alleviating poverty, microfinance financialises poverty. By indebting poor people in the Global South, it drives financial expansion and opens new lands of opportunity for the crisis-ridden global capital markets. This book raises fundamental concerns about this widely-celebrated tool for social development.

Book When People Care Enough to Act

Download or read book When People Care Enough to Act written by Mike Green and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developed in response to the question "I love ABCD (Asset Based Community Development); what do I do Monday Morning?"--and based on Mike Green & Henry Moore's highly regarded work as ABCD organizers, consultants and trainers--these materials support a practical approach to creating community collaborations that work. Enriching each other, the book and the DVD provide clear exposition of ABCD organizing principles and best practices, examples of ABCD organizing in action, learning exercises, worksheets, and reflections from experienced practitioners of ABCD organizing. Main topics include: ABCD Principles & Practice Discovering What People Care About Mobilizing A Community's Assets People & Programs: We Need Both Leading By Stepping Back: The Role Of Governments & Agencies Inclusion: There Is No One We Do Not Need John McKnight's Reflections On ABCD organizing. Lessons from Ashville NC, Marque.e, MI, Laconia, NH, Savannah, GA, Ames, IO.

Book Radical Innocent  Upton Sinclair

Download or read book Radical Innocent Upton Sinclair written by Anthony Arthur and published by Random House. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few American writers have revealed their private as well as their public selves so fully as Upton Sinclair, and virtually none over such a long lifetime (1878—1968). Sinclair’s writing, even at its most poignant or electrifying, blurred the line between politics and art–and, indeed, his life followed a similar arc. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur weaves the strands of Sinclair’s contentious public career and his often-troubled private life into a compelling personal narrative. An unassuming teetotaler with a fiery streak, called a propagandist by some, the most conservative of revolutionaries by others, Sinclair was such a driving force of history that one could easily mistake his life story for historical fiction. He counted dozens of epochal figures as friends or confidants, including Mark Twain, Jack London, Henry Ford, Thomas Mann, H. G. Wells, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Albert Einstein, Charlie Chaplin, Albert Camus, and Carl Jung. Starting with The Jungle in 1906, Sinclair’s fiction and nonfiction helped to inform and mold American opinions about socialism, labor and industry, religion and philosophy, the excesses of the media, American political isolation and pacifism, civil liberties, and mental and physical health. In his later years, Sinclair twice reinvented himself, first as the Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934, and later, in his sixties and seventies, as a historical novelist. In 1943 he won a Pulitzer Prize for Dragon’s Teeth, one of eleven novels featuring super-spy Lanny Budd. Outside the literary realm, the ever-restless Sinclair was seemingly everywhere: forming Utopian artists’ colonies, funding and producing Sergei Eisenstein’s film documentaries, and waging consciousness-raising political campaigns. Even when he wasn’t involved in progressive causes or counterculture movements, his name often was invoked by them–an arrangement that frequently embroiled Sinclair in controversy. Sinclair’ s passion and optimistic zeal inspired America, but privately he could be a frustrated, petty man who connected better with his readers than with members of his own family. His life with his first wife, Meta, his son David, and various friends and professional acquaintances was a web of conflict and strain. Personally and professionally ambitious, Sinclair engaged in financial speculation, although his wealth-generating schemes often benefited his pet causes–and he lobbied as tirelessly for professional recognition and awards as he did for government reform. As the tenor of his work would suggest, Sinclair was supremely human. In Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, Anthony Arthur offers an engrossing and enlightening account of Sinclair’s life and the country he helped to transform. Taking readers from the Reconstruction South to the rise of American power to the pinnacle of Hollywood culture to the Civil Rights era, this is historical biography at its entertaining and thought-provoking finest.

Book The Heretic s Guide to Global Finance

Download or read book The Heretic s Guide to Global Finance written by Brett Scott and published by Pluto Press. This book was released on 2013-05-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular anger against bankers and financial speculators has never been greater, yet the practical workings of the system remain opaque to many people. The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance aims to bridge the gap between protest slogans and practical proposals for reform. As a stockbroker turned campaigner, Brett Scott has a unique understanding of life inside and outside the system. The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance is a practical handbook for campaigners, academics and students who wish to deepen their understanding of the inner workings of the financial sector. It shows how financial knowledge can be used to build effective social and environmental campaigns. Scott covers topics frequently overlooked, such as the cultural aspects of the financial sector, and considers major issues such as agricultural speculation, carbon markets and tar sands financing. The book shows how activists can use the internal dynamics of the sector to reform it and showcases the growing alternative finance movement.

Book Why Doesn t Microfinance Work

Download or read book Why Doesn t Microfinance Work written by Milford Bateman and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since its emergence in the 1970s, microfinance has risen to become one of the most high-profile policies to address poverty in developing and transition countries. It is beloved of rock stars, movie stars, royalty, high-profile politicians and ‘troubleshooting’ economists. In this provocative and controversial analysis, Milford Bateman reveals that microfinance doesn’t actually work. In fact, the case for it has been largely built on hype, on egregious half-truths and – latterly – on the Wall Street-style greed of those promoting and working in microfinance. Using a multitude of case studies, from India to Cambodia, Bolivia to Uganda, Serbia to Mexico, Bateman demonstrates that microfi nance actually constitutes a major barrier to sustainable economic and social development, and thus also to sustainable poverty reduction. As developing and transition countries attempt to repair the devastation wrought by the global financial crisis, Why Doesn’t Microfinance Work? argues forcefully that the role of microfinance in development policy urgently needs to be reconsidered.

Book When She Woke

    Book Details:
  • Author : Hillary Jordan
  • Publisher : Algonquin Books
  • Release : 2012-09-18
  • ISBN : 1616201843
  • Pages : 369 pages

Download or read book When She Woke written by Hillary Jordan and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2012-09-18 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bellwether Prize winner Hillary Jordan’s provocative new novel, When She Woke, tells the story of a stigmatized woman struggling to navigate an America of a not-too-distant future, where the line between church and state has been eradicated and convicted felons are no longer imprisoned and rehabilitated but chromed—their skin color is genetically altered to match the class of their crimes—and then released back into the population to survive as best they can. Hannah is a Red; her crime is murder. In seeking a path to safety in an alien and hostile world, Hannah unknowingly embarks on a path of self-discovery that forces her to question the values she once held true and the righteousness of a country that politicizes faith.

Book The Divide  Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets

Download or read book The Divide Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets written by Jason Hickel and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Global inequality doesn’t just exist; it has been created. More than four billion people—some 60 percent of humanity—live in debilitating poverty, on less than $5 per day. The standard narrative tells us this crisis is a natural phenomenon, having to do with things like climate and geography and culture. It tells us that all we have to do is give a bit of aid here and there to help poor countries up the development ladder. It insists that if poor countries would only adopt the right institutions and economic policies, they could overcome their disadvantages and join the ranks of the rich world. Anthropologist Jason Hickel argues that this story ignores the broader political forces at play. Global poverty—and the growing inequality between the rich countries of Europe and North America and the poor ones of Africa, Asia, and South America—has come about because the global economy has been designed over the course of five hundred years of conquest, colonialism, regime change, and globalization to favor the interests of the richest and most powerful nations. Global inequality is not natural or inevitable, and it is certainly not accidental. To close the divide, Hickel proposes dramatic action rooted in real justice: abolishing debt burdens in the global South, democratizing the institutions of global governance, and rolling out an international minimum wage, among many other vital steps. Only then will we have a chance at a world where all begin on more equal footing.