REQUIRED) A decade ago, the microfinance industry prided itself on its trends toward financial and operational sustainability. Recently, investors, donors, lenders, regulators, and microfinance institutions have been more concerned with social and outreach performance. Transactions cost and distance theories inform a new ICT-enabled microfinance institution (MFI) outreach theory positing that i...

Despite global recognition and sufficient history of microfinance there is mixed evidence of its net benefits and very limited empirical work on its contribution to financial intermediation and economic growth. Addressing this gap we aim to reveal whether and how microfinance is transferred to growth. Our conceptual approach is based on a broader finance-and-growth nexus where microfinance is s...

March 2005 57 Bindu Ananth is a Manager at ICICI Bank. She has worked in ICICI Bank's microfinance practice for over three years and is currently the co-ordinator of the Centre for MicroFinance Research. The views presented in this paper are solely those of the author and do not in any way reflect the views of ICICI Bank. Capital constraint is an issue impeding scaling up of microfinance in Ind...

Microfinance is widely hailed as a sustainable approach to global poverty reduction, particularly among women who are over-represented among the world’s poor and often lack access to traditional labor markets and financial instruments. In this regard, evidence suggests that microfinance positively affects women’s empowerment, social capital, and economic conditions. However, there is considerab...

This paper provides a quantitative evaluation of the aggregate and distributional impacts of economy-wide microfinance or credit programs targeted toward small-scale businesses. In our analysis, we find that the redistributive impacts of microfinance are stronger in general equilibrium than in partial equilibrium, but the aggregate impacts are smaller. Making the typical microfinance program mo...

The organization, technology and operation of microfinance have undergone much change and differentiation. Muhammad Yunus, a Nobel-prize winner first demonstrated the possible empowerment of poor people by means of microfinance. Even so, certain cases have indicated that this empowerment does not necessarily occur and that microfinance can even be damaging. In this paper, we describe a case stu...

Attempts to measure the depth of outreach in microfinance usually start—and often end—with loan size. But just what is loan size? This paper discusses seven aspects of loan size, each of which affects not only depth of outreach but also profitability. The seven aspects are: term to maturity, dollars disbursed, average balance, dollars per installment, time between installments, number of instal...

This paper examines how availability of microfinance influences households’ borrowing from informal sources in village economies. It uses a unique household level panel data set, which spans more than two decades (1987–2008), from rural Bangladesh. We find that households’ access to microfinance reduces the incidence of borrowing from informal sources, but not the amount of borrowing. We find t...

not small savers—defined here as the half of all savings clients of a microfinance institution (MFI) with the smallest deposit account balances— contribute to or undermine the sustainability of the MFI. MFI sustainability has long been accorded a place of central importance in microfinance for reasons that are well known. Perhaps because of the necessary focus of microfinance for so many years ...

Microfinance institutions have long recognized that providing women with access to loans empowers them in a number of ways. However, different microfinance service delivery models have been tested in various socioeconomic and cultural circumstances with varying results. This article highlights two major models: Group Guarantee Lending and Community Managed Loan Funds. It gives an overview of th...