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Oct 24, 2008

HIV Discoverer Advocates More Science for AIDS Eradication

Even the most optimistic concede that continued complacency toward the rash of new infections that occur every year will cause the worldwide disease burden to far outweigh the treatment possibilities for the foreseeable future.

Oct 18, 2008

The Real Impacts of Micro-Credit

Early analysis of results from the first randomized controlled trial on a micro-credit project calls into question a number of assumptions about microfinance as an overarching tool with impact on a wide range of development issues like education, health status and women’s empowerment.

Oct 18, 2008

What’s So Hard About Saving?

One of the many confounding questions of microfinance is why people don’t save more. The first blush assumption that the poor cannot save because they don’t have the money has been dis-proven by data. Surveys of household consumption among those living on less than $2 a day show that they spend a significant portion of their income on non-essential items. In many cases where savings products are available they are widely used, even when they are objectively terrible (negative interest rates, inconvenient).

Oct 17, 2008

What Is It About Women?

There is no tenet of microfinance theory more fundamental than the focus on women. The marketing narrative is replete with reasons why a focus on women is sacrosanct. To quote Muhammad Yunus: “Women have greater long-term vision and are ready to bring changes in their life step by step. They are also excellent managers of scarce resources, stretching the use of every resource to the maximum.” And of course, we all “know” that women invest more in their households and children than men do. Get ready for a surprise.

Oct 17, 2008

Entrepreneurs and Microlenders

As the current global credit crisis illustrates in part, it is very difficult for lenders to determine what makes an individual, much less a small business, a good risk.

Oct 17, 2008

Does the Design of Loans Impact Repayment Rates?

The first panel of the conference was on “Credit Product Design: Monitoring and Enforcement” – put more simply, how does the design of microfinance products affect repayment rates? Two very interesting studies were presented, one that examines the impact, or lack thereof, of moving from weekly to monthly repayments and another that looks at the impact of implementing a credit bureau.

Oct 17, 2008

Cutting Edge Research on Microfinance

We’re attending a conference of microfinance researchers hosted by Innovations for Poverty Action and the Financial Access Initiative. The conference is not your typical microfinance conference – all the presentations are by academic researchers who are conducting randomized controlled trials to learn how, how much and why microfinance works (or doesn’t). That being said, the research is not being done for academic purposes alone but to learn with microfinance organizations how they can improve their products and their impact. Jonathan Morduch set the stage by considering both the tremendous progress that has been made in research on microfinance in the last decade and the huge remaining gaps in knowledge we have. These gaps are critically important because although the industry has grown rapidly (from roughly 14 million clients a decade ago to 150 million clients today) the number of people without access to formal financial services remains in the billions.