(2011) Economic evaluation of a combined microfinance and gender training intervention for the prevention of intimate partner violence in rural South Africa. Key messages o There is increasing interest in the development of interventions that in resource poor settings combine health with economic and social development initiatives such as microfinance o Not much evidence currently exists of the...

Microfinance has entered the phase of rapid development and it has become one of the most important businesses in commercial banks. This study set up an evaluation system based on the balanced scorecard and used the fuzzy-rough set approach to evaluate the microfinance performance. Firstly, this study designed the performance evaluation system from five dimensions according to the principals of...

Rooftops Canada, the Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa (a division of the FinMark Trust), and Habitat for Humanity International have been partners in the development of a subSaharan housing microfinance sector since 2008, following two housing microfinance workshops, held in Dar es Salaam in 2008 and Nairobi in 2010. Over 200 people from more than 15 African countries and ten oth...

The objective of this paper is to estimate the impacts of medium and long term participation in microfinance programs. It utilises a new, large and unique panel dataset collected from treatment and control households from 1997 to 2005. The data enables us to identify continuing participants in the program as well as newcomers and leavers. We employ different estimation strategies including trip...

Microfinance programs are recognized as a way of improving incomes and creating employment for large numbers of low-income families, but there are concerns that working conditions within these informal microenterprises are far from ideal. For example, when families receive loans to expand a microenterprise, children may make up the labor shortfall until the family can afford to hire adult worke...

This paper attempts to quantify the ill-effects of covariate shocks such as natural disasters on the sustainability of microfinance. The vulnerability of microfinance to covariate shocks is wellknown theoretically and in anecdotes, but very few quantitative evidence exists. For our attempt, we use a unique dataset of about 3,000 micro-borrower households covering over a period of 1994-2006 incl...

Information and communication technology (ICT) can be termed as a reagent for the microfinance sector. It has contributed significantly for the growth of this sector, which is clearly depicted from the reviewed literature as well as the market evaluation. The paper analyzes the impact of technological advancements within the microfinance industry from academic as well as practitioner’s point of...

a r t i c l e i n f o Microfinance is a vital source of funding for micro-entrepreneurs in emerging markets and underdeveloped nations. The emphasis in the literature on social sanctions as a mechanism for ensuring high repayment rates may be misplaced. We propose that the construct of harmonious social relations needs to be added in order to explain repayment rates and that high repayment rate...

We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous variation in the importance (in a network sense) of the people who were first informed about the program,...

Microfinance has come to play a major role in many gender and development strategies because of its direct relationship to both poverty alleviation and to the empowerment of women. Women are the most crucial elements of the social fabric and are playing a pivotal role in the socioeconomic scenario of Rajasthan. Microfinance programs like the SHGs in India have been promoted for their positive e...