The widespread popularity of microfinance as a "win-win" solution to global poverty alleviation has significantly limited debate and dialogue around contesting viewpoints, program structures, and implementation norms. The present microcredit industry in Lebanon offers an authoritative space for practitioners to explore a differing microcredit model as implemented by a Hezbollah affiliated NGO, ...

USD Trans-Border Institute • 1 • www.sandiego.edu/tbi ...microcredit advocates believe that access to credit enables people to improve their own lives and economic situation. ...this brief examines the use of microcredit lending in the U.S.-Mexico border region, a complex, highly metropolitan area. Microcredit Lending in the Border Region Microcredit lending has become a major innovation in ant...

OBJECTIVE To assess the impact of health promotion programs and microcredit programs on three communities in the Dominican Republic. One community had only the health promotion program, one community had only the microcredit program, and one community had both a health promotion program and a microcredit program. This pilot project examined the hypothesis that the largest changes in 11 health i...

BACKGROUND Microcredit services--the awarding of small loans to individuals who are too poor to take advantage of traditional financial services--are an increasingly popular scheme for poverty alleviation. Several studies have examined the ability of microcredit programmes to influence the financial standing of borrowers, but only a few studies have examined whether the added household income i...

Please (2012), Summary. — Microcredit and small and medium enterprise (SME) finance are often pitched as alternative strategies to create employment opportunities in low-income communities. So far, though, little is known about how employment patterns compare. We integrate evidence from three surveys to show that, compared to Bangladeshi microcredit customers, typical SME employees in Banglades...

According to social exclusion theory, health risks are positively associated with involuntary social, economic, political and cultural exclusion from society. In this paper, a social exclusion framework has been used, and available literature on microcredit in Bangladesh has been reviewed to explore the available evidence on associations among microcredit, exclusion, and health outcomes. The pa...

Public health researchers are increasingly shifting their attention away from merely documenting those factors that determine health--a solid evidence base on health determinants now exists--to improving our understanding of how various interventions influence population health. This paper argues for greater investigations of the potential unintended health benefits associated with participatio...

Microcredit loans have transformed the lives of impoverished people in many countries by allowing them to start businesses. But increasingly microcredit banks are realizing that providing some kind of health coverage in tandem with the loans is essential if they want to fulfil their mission to improve lives.

This paper addresses the emergence of microcredit programmes as a preferred strategy for poverty alleviation world-wide. Taking the paradigmatic case of Nepal, it engages a genealogical approach to trace how Nepalese planners’ enduring concerns about rural development intersect in surprising (and gendered) ways with donors’ present focus on deepening Ž nancial markets. In the resulting microcre...

The existing theoretical analysis of micro…nance focuses on the nature of the loan contract such as group liability. We draw attention to the role of missing or imperfect labor market in understanding some of the important ‘second generation’debates in micro…nance. Our analysis helps explain a number puzzles in micro…nance such as (i) high repayment rates with high interest rates, (ii) di¢ cult...