BACKGROUND The United Nations Millennium Development Goals include targets for the health of children under five years old. Poor health is linked to poverty and microfinance initiatives are economic interventions that may improve health by breaking the cycle of poverty. However, there is a lack of reliable evidence to support this. In addition, microfinance schemes may have adverse effects on h...

Microfinance Institutions have the potential to alleviate poverty across the world. However, they face many challenges before they can grow to meet set objectives. The use of information technology holds promise to enable such growth. There are some key challenges that must be addressed by microfinance institutions before the full potential of IT can be realized. This paper articulates five key...

this paper aims to comprehend the intrinsic limitations of the market players in the financial system and how these create a situation of `missing middle` for small and medium industries (sme) financing in bangladesh. a clear dualism prevails in the manufacturing industry of this country. while the smes maintains the biggest share in establishments and employment creation, large enterprises (le...

This paper examines the combined effect of interest rates and poverty levels of microfinance clients on loan size. Cross section data on 2,691 clients and non-clients households from Ghana is used to test the hypothesis of loan price inelasticity. Quantile regression and variants of least squares methods that explore endogeneity are employed. We find the expected inverse relationship only for t...

Since 1989, CRS Senegal has been implementing microfinance (MF) activities in partnership with the local Catholic Church dioceses and Caritas offices, using the village banking methodology. In 1999, CRS and Caritas Senegal began a MF institutional transformation process that joined the most successful village banking program in the diocese of Thiès and two CRS MF projects in the Casamance regio...

This study examines the effects of gender diversity on economic performance within the microfinance industry. We use ROA to capture financial performance and OpEx to capture operating efficiency. We measure gender diversity at two hierarchical levels: gender diversity within the Board represents the decision-making level; gender composition within the rank of loan officers embodies the operatio...

Microfinance institutions are used to claim that their impact goes beyond money since rescuing from exclusion uncollateralized poor borrowers significantly affects their dignity, self-esteem, social recognition and, through it, life satisfaction. Our paper aims to verify the validity of this claim by evaluating whether access to microfinance loans has significant direct impact on life satisfact...