Private equity investments have put a premium on the valuation of microfinance companies when maybe they should be giving them a discount.
Moderate results are disappointing if you were expecting microfinance to cure poverty. But they are just what you’d expect if you think microfinance is about bringing financial services to people who never had them before.
Kiva, the Swahili word for “unity” or “agreement,” has come to stand for the power of microfinance and the internet. Founded in 2005 as the first micro-lending platform in the world, Kiva secured the first free payment processing …
Microfinance — making tiny loans to poor people or groups of poor people — has soared in India in the past few years. Before long, it could reach more people in India than the regular banking system.
Microfinance is going mainstream as international investors look to boost the value and the reach of small microlending institutions. As a result, the industry is likely to attract mainstream scrutiny from the press.
Unfortunately, the microfinance community has barely started scratching the surface of how to modify existing products to adapt to climate change. Instead, MFIs have tended to fall back upon a reactive approach in which the current …
Microfinance Focus, June 23, 2010: Bullish sentiments dominated the session on ‘Perspective from the marketplace’ at MCCM where leading international.
“If you keep looking at microfinance from the point of view of idealism, it’ll never work,” says the director of an investment company. “But you can’t see poor people as a paying concer…
Microfinance Focus, June 23, 2010: Driven by their stupendous growth, microfinance organizations have started exploring a plethora of financing instruments to.
Microfinance has grown from a small program in the 1970s in Bangladesh to a worldwide movement today. Microfinance is basically the small loans that are granted to the third world poor. Such microloans are usually provided through …
