Download or read book Microfinance is Our Business Cooperating Out of Poverty written by International Labour Office. Office of the Director-General and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 1 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Microfinance an Economic Analysis of Banking to the Poor written by Samuel Wahlen and published by Archway Publishing. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 139 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Great strides are being made in technology, medicine, and other fields, but with these advances, many people are still being left behind in poverty. The poor struggle to feed their families, work long hours for little pay, and face obstacles in educating themselves and their children. They see no end to the nightmareand they feel trapped. World leaders have responded by offering a handout rather than a hand up, which does nothing to fix the problem. In this book, youll learn why: Foreign aid to developing countries weakens democratic institutions and empowers leaders to make bad policy decisions. Small businesses serve an important role in strengthening economies in developing countries. Small business owners opt out of legal environments and choose to operate in informal sectors. Microfinance institutions offer the poor greater flexibility and opportunity than larger financial institutions. When helping the poor, the goal does not need to be unanimous economic equality, but we must provide opportunities to escape the clutches of poverty. Find out how it can be done, step by step, with Microfinance.

Download or read book Microfinance and Poverty Reduction written by Susan Johnson and published by Oxfam. This book was released on 1997 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The book emphasizes the importance of studying the local context, and then considering the macroeconomic factors which may be operating upon the economy of a particular country. Five extended case studies, in the Gambia, Ecuador, Mexico, Pakistan, and the UK are examined with reference to further aspects of sustainability and impact assessment.

Download or read book Microfinance and Sustainable Development in Africa written by Alhassan, Yahaya and published by IGI Global. This book was released on 2021-12-10 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The use of microfinance for poverty reduction and economic development in the developing world is growing. However, this concept needs to be expanded to ensure its successful application for achieving longer-term economic growth and sustainability in developing countries, particularly in parts of the world such as Africa. As such, further research into the relationship between microfinance and sustainable development in developing regions is required to fully understand the opportunities for effective use of microfinance for poverty reduction and economic development. Microfinance and Sustainable Development in Africa examines the complex relationship between receipt of microfinance, poverty reduction, economic growth, and microbusiness development, focusing on the provision of small credit facilities as a driver of sustainable development in Africa. Its coverage of topics such as microbusiness, social finance, and sustainable development make this book an ideal reference source for academicians, researchers, government officials, policymakers, organizations, managers, instructors, and students.

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.

Download or read book Due Diligence written by David Roodman and published by CGD Books. This book was released on 2012 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The idea that small loans can help poor families build businesses and exit poverty has blossomed into a global movement. The concept has captured the public imagination, drawn in billions of dollars, reached millions of customers, and garnered a Nobel Prize. Radical in its suggestion that the poor are creditworthy and conservative in its insistence on individual accountability, the idea has expanded beyond credit into savings, insurance, and money transfers, earning the name microfinance. But is it the boon so many think it is? Readers of David Roodman's openbook blog will immediately recognize his thorough, straightforward, and trenchant analysis. Due Diligence, written entirely in public with input from readers, probes the truth about microfinance to guide governments, foundations, investors, and private citizens who support financial services for poor people. In particular, it explains the need to deemphasize microcredit in favor of other financial services for the poor.

Download or read book From Microfinance to Business Planning Escaping Poverty Traps written by Roberto Moro Visconti and published by ibidem-Verlag / ibidem Press. This book was released on 2014-06-01 with total page 645 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This ground-breaking book shows how innovative microfinance solutions can help billions to avoid ‚poverty traps‘ and escape atavistic misery. While the success of microfinance has globally exceeded even the wildest expectations, there are still many obstacles – above all the lack of proper business planning on the side of the borrowers. Here Moro Visconti‘s important book comes to aid, offering bottom-up development strategies for micro-credit-driven startups and beyond. His forceful analysis of poverty traps and the practical guidelines given (including business plan templates as Excel sheets) are designed to help practitioners and analysts alike in understanding and reaching the true potential of microfinance.

Download or read book Seduced and Betrayed written by Milford Bateman and published by University of New Mexico Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Microfinance began as the disbursement of tiny loans to the poor, which they could use to undertake informal income-generating activities. It went on to become one of the most popular international development policies of all time and a mainstay of local development and antipoverty programs across the Global South. The contributors to this multidisciplinary volume consider the origins, evolution, and outcomes of microfinance from a variety of perspectives and contend that it has been an unsuccessful approach to development. The contributors contend that over the last twenty years, microfinance policies have exacerbated poverty and exclusion, undermined gender empowerment, underpinned a massive growth in inequality, destroyed solidarity and trust in the community, and, overall, manifestly weakened those local economies of the Global South where it reached critical mass. They use qualitative anthropological, economic, and political-economic research to unpack the ideas and values that have allowed microfinance to “seduce” the world and blind so many to its corrosive effects.

Download or read book From Microfinance to Inclusive Finance written by R. H. Schmidt and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-09-19 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once praised as a panacea to overcome poverty microfinance has had to face harsh criticism because of painful failures and unfulfilled expectations. Still many people in particular in rural regions do not have any access to formal financial services, many microfinance institutions are weak, and others rather exploit their clients driving them into over indebtedness than helping them out of poverty. What should microfinance achieve? Can it help to build up inclusive financial systems allowing access to basic financial services for everybody? The historic templates for this book are the German Sparkassen and Cooperative banks that have a strong track record of development and growth spanning over 200 years. For obvious reasons their results cannot be transferred directly into specific solution options to today's challenges in developing countries. Nevertheless the coming into existence of Sparkassen and Cooperative banks can well be seen as part of a period of revolutionary developments in the European economic and social landscape, which can be viewed as analogous to the transformation that emerging economies are undergoing today. While Europe faced dramatically changing living conditions during the period of industrialization these newly creatd banks made change possible by unequivocally including the lower class population in the transformationby providing access to savings and loans. And it is this is parallel - even in the face of the many differences - which is why their development and success deserves careful consideration today. The authors' approach differsfrom other explorations by specifically adopting an interdisciplinary strategy. They take into account past developments as well as current global ones from a historical, social science and economic point of view. Analysis and the interpretation of data is supported by case studies to illustrate their considerations. The authors identify general parameters both for failure and for success and also indicate how to optimize existing potentials - both for institutions and policy makers. As a result of this interdisciplinary work the authors advance an inclusive stylised facts based model. The will to build up institutions, to adhere to corporate social responsibility and creating conducive legal frameworks form the basic conditions for success. More specifically, the guiding principles of these successful business models are a fair savings and credit policy, the promotion of capital transfers without reference to class and gender, a focus on business activities in a well defined region, decentralized organizational structures combined with national networks which avoid regional capital drains and the securing of economies of scale and scope. Llast but not least is the centrality of objectives beyond that of the sheer maximisation of profits.

Download or read book Why Doesn t Microfinance Work written by Milford Bateman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-06-10 with total page 274 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.

Download or read book Microfinance written by Jude L. Fernando and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-08-02 with total page 455 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Microfinance is defined as the financial services offered to the poor for the purpose of promoting small-scale enterprises, and as such it is one of the most important topics in development studies and a burgeoning area in economics. This volume provides a much-needed historical, political and economic dimension to the current knowledge on microfinance. Collectively, the contributors chart the relationship between the prevailing popularity of microfinance and the consolidation of neoliberal economic ideology worldwide. They demonstrate how microfinance, as a market-friendly approach to development, coincides with the global trend towards diminishing the role of the state in economic development, basic healthcare, education and welfare. The articles in the volume focus on the empirical analyses of the experience of microfinance in women’s everyday lives, but rejects the connection between microfinance and women’s empowerment so often imputed in literature. This book offers regional, cultural and other explanations for variable assessments of microfinance and empowerment. It fills a huge gap in published microfinance literature and will be of great interest to postgraduates and professionals in the fields of economics, international finance and banking.

Download or read book We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky written by Mara Kardas-Nelson and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2024-06-11 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A deeply reported work of journalism that explores the promises and perils of microfinance, told through the eyes of international lenders and women borrowers in West Africa In the mid-1970s, Muhammad Yunus, an American trained Bangladeshi economist, met a poor female stool maker who needed money to expand her business. In an act widely known as the beginning of microfinance, Yunus lent $27 to forty-two women, hoping small credit would help the women pull themselves out of poverty. Soon, Yunus’s Grameen Bank was born, and the idea of giving very small, high-interest loans to poor people took off. In 2006, Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for “efforts to create economic and social development from below.” But there’s a problem with this story. There are mounting concerns that these small loans are as likely to bury poor people in debt as they are to pull them from poverty, with borrowers from India to Kenya facing consequences such as jail time and forced land sales. Reportedly hundreds have even committed suicide. What happened? Did microfinance take a wrong turn, or was it flawed from the beginning? Mara Kardas-Nelson’s We Are Not Able to Live in the Sky is about unintended consequences, blind optimism, and the decades-long ramifications of seemingly small policy choices. The book is rooted in the stories of women borrowers in Sierra Leone, West Africa. Their narratives, woven through a deep history of modern international development, are set against the rise of Yunus’s vision that tiny loans would “put poverty in museums.” Kardas-Nelson asks: What is missed with a single, financially focused solution to global inequity that ignores the real drivers of poverty? Who stands to benefit and, more important, who gets left behind?

Download or read book The Microfinance Mirage written by Dr Esayas Bekele Geleta and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2015-06-28 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Making a unique contribution to our further understanding of the microfinance industry this book shows that, in some cases, microfinance can result in the disintegration of pre-existing relationships and in the disruption and destruction of the livelihoods of the poor. Exploring the impact of microfinance in one of the poorest regions of sub-Saharan Africa this book demonstrates its potential and problems and shows the complex and contradictory social and cultural environments in which projects are often located.

Download or read book A Billion Bootstraps Microcredit Barefoot Banking and The Business Solution for Ending Poverty written by Philip Smith and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2007-02-23 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A bold manifesto by two business leaders, A Billion Bootstraps shows why microcredit is the world's most powerful poverty-fighting movement-and an unbeatable investment for your charitable donations. A Billion Bootstraps unearths the roots of the microcredit revolution, revealing how the pioneering work of people such as Dr. Muhammad Yunus-winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize-is giving hope to billions. Philanthropist and self-made millionaire Phil Smith and microcredit expert and consultant Eric Thurman provide a riveting narrative that explores how these small loans, arranged by “barefoot bankers,” enable impoverished people to start small businesses, support their families, and improve local economies. By paying back their loans instead of simply accepting handouts, men and women around the world are continually giving others the same opportunity to change their futures. Smith and Thurman also examine why traditional charity programs, while providing short-term relief, often perpetuate the problems they are trying to alleviate, and how applying investment principles to philanthropy is the key to reversing poverty permanently. A Billion Bootstraps explains how ordinary people can accelerate the microcredit movement by investing charitable donations in specific programs and then leveraging those contributions so the net cost to lift one person out of poverty is remarkably low. You'll discover how to get more for your money by donating with the mind-set of an investor and calculating measurable returns-returns that will change lives and societies forever.

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 251 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.

Download or read book Financializing Poverty written by Sohini Kar and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-10 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Microfinance is the business of giving small, collateral-free loans to poor borrowers that are paid back in frequent intervals with interest. While these for-profit microfinance institutions (MFIs) promise social and economic empowerment, they have mainly succeeded at enfolding the poor—especially women—into the vast circuits of global finance. Financializing Poverty ethnographically examines how the emergence of MFIs has allowed financial institutions in the city of Kolkata, India, to capitalize on the poverty of its residents. This book reveals how MFIs have restructured debt relationships in new ways. On the one hand, they have opened access to new streams of credit. However, as the network of finance increasingly incorporates the poor, the "inclusive" dimensions of microfinance are continuously met with rigid forms of credit risk management that reproduce the very inequality the loans are meant to alleviate. Moreover, despite being collateral-free loans, the use of life insurance to manage the high mortality rates of poor borrowers has led to the collateralization of life itself. Thus the newfound ability of the poor to use MFI loans has entrapped them in a system dependent not only on their circulation of capital, but on the poverty that threatens their lives.

Download or read book Inspired Finance written by M. Looft and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-10-02 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By tracing an arc of thought and action from both historical and religious figures up through modern microfinance practitioners, Looft illustrates the many ways religious inspiration continues to remain at the crux of international economic development–while raising compelling questions around God and Mammon working together to help the poor.