Objective. To share experiences from a project that integrates a mental health intervention within a developmental framework of microcredit activity for economically underprivileged women in rural India. Method. The mental health intervention had two components: group counseling and stress management. The former comprised of ventilation and reassurance and the latter strengthening of coping ski...

This study extends research on the social performance of microfinance institutions. The research methodology is based on Grameen Progress out of Poverty Index™ (PPI™) for Cambodia applied to a sample of borrowers randomly extracted from a Cambodian microfinance institution's loan portfolio. Dataset has been directly collected through in-house interviews. Main questions discussed here are: (1) I...

BACKGROUND Millennium Development Goal 1 encourages local initiatives for the eradication of extreme poverty. However, monitoring is indispensable to insure that actions performed at higher policy levels attain success. Poverty in rural areas in low- and middle-income countries remains chronic. Nevertheless, a rural area (Cuatro Santos) in northern Nicaragua has made substantial progress toward...

There is good reason to combine education with microcredit for poverty alleviation in the poor communities of the developing world, including in Indonesia. Poverty is dangerous, it deprives people of their right to education, their right to good health, their right to freedom of speech, their right to democracy, their right to financial services and of course their right to knowledge enhancemen...

Causal evidence on microcredit impacts informs theory, practice, and debates about its e ectiveness as a development tool. The six randomized evaluations in this volume use a variety of sampling, data collection, experimental design, and econometric strategies to identify causal e ects of expanded access to microcredit on borrowers and/or communities. These methods are deployed across an impres...

Microcredit and other forms of small-scale finance in the developing world have failed to catalyze entrepreneurship. This prompts a re-examination of the special features of informal credit markets that cause them to operate inefficiently. We present a theory that highlights two of these features. First, the borrower has limited commitment and cannot pledge the benefits of her growth. Second, b...

We develop a model of repeated microcredit lending to study how group size affects optimal group-lending contracts with joint liability. In the setting being studied, a benevolent lender provides microcredit to a group of borrowers to invest in projects. The outcome of each risky project is not observable by the lender; therefore, if some of the borrowers default on their loan repayments, the l...

How has the microcredit movement managed to push financial frontiers? If borrowers vary in unobservable risk, then group-based, joint liability contracts price for risk more accurately than individual contracts, provided that borrowers match positively assortatively by project riskiness (Ghatak, 1999, 2000). This more accurate risk-pricing can attract safer borrowers and rouse an otherwise dorm...

Research onmicrocredit is now two decades old. There has been enormous progress in understanding bothwhatmicrocredit does and how. Yet a lot of what we have learned has raised new and often quite fundamental questions about its nature: Is microcredit primarily about investment, consumption, or savings? Why is it that the investments financed by microcredit do not always lead to income growth, a...