The Microfinance Revolution: Sustainable Finance for the Poor

By R. Meyer. 2003

749 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Revolutionaries are not noted for the modesty of their aims, or their claims. Nevertheless, it is certainly true that microfinance the provision of very small loans and deposit services to predominantly poor, under-served, rural, mostly women borrowers and savers has captured the imagination of policy-makers, development practitioners, and researchers in ways that few other programs have. Aid grants and financing have flowed to support microfinance programs, NGOs have incorporated microfinance in their health or education or gender equity programs, Bangladeshs Grameen Bank is now almost as famous as the World Bank, and the UN General Assembly has declared 2005 as the International Year of Microcredit. This volume, the first in what is to be a three-volume series, tries to recount important parts of the story of that revolution. Subsequent volumes are to present an in-depth case study of Indonesia, whose microfinance institutions Robinson is most familiar with, and draw lessons from best practices for a prospective look at the likely evolution of microfinance over the next quarter century.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

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Citations in the corpus

The Impact of Microfinance in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review of the Evidence (2012, background): “The provision of “micro” financial services to the poor (those earning less than $2/day), in particular small loans of $50–$1000, has been hailed by advocates as an effective poverty alleviation and development tool (CGAP, 2003, pp. 1; Robinson, 2001; Yunus, 1999).”
Facilitating Savings for Agriculture: Field Experimental Evidence from Malawi (2015, positive): “…challenges inherent in agricultural lending.1 Given the limited supply of credit for agriculture, many donors and academics ðe.g., Deaton 1990; Robinson 2001; and more recently the Bill and Melinda Gates FoundationÞ have emphasized the potential for increasing access to formal…”
Expanding credit access: Using randomized supply decisions to estimate the impacts (2006, neutral): “But many practitioners remain skeptical about “unproductive” lending (Robinson 2001).”
Struggling with social capital: Pakistani women micro entrepreneurs’ challenges in acquiring resources (2017, background): “Trust among the group members is therefore essential, because no one will be granted a second loan unless everyone in the group has repaid the first loan (Jaffer 1999; Robinson 2001).”
Renewable energy markets in developing countries (2003, background): “Credit may be provided either by vendors themselves, by rural development banks, or by microcredit organizations (132).”
Systematic Review. What is the evidence of the impact of microfinance on the well-being of poor people? (2011, background): “There are several books reviewing microfinance (Hulme and Mosley 1996, Khandker 1998, Ledgerwood 1999, Robinson 2001, Johnson and Rogaly 1997, Armendáriz de Aghion and Morduch 2005 (A&M), Ledgerwood et al. 2006, Dichter and Harper 2007, Bateman 2010, Roy 2010).”
Finance for the Poor: From Microcredit to Microfinancial Services (2002, background): “One exception to the general state of affairs is the Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI)—see Robinson (2001) for a detailed discussion—which manages to deliver conventional banking services to low income clients (Box 1).”
Analysis of the Effects of Microfinance on Poverty Reduction (2001, background): “This finding is supported further by analyzing only those households with fewer than 50 decimals of land….the ultra-poor do participate in micro-finance programs.”
What's Advertising Content Worth? Evidence from a Consumer Credit Marketing Field Experiment (2010, background): “…was jointly significantly different from zero.29 The applied (or “takeup”) model has a p-value of .07 (column (1)), and the “obtained a loan” model has a p-value of .04 (column (4)), implying that advertising content did influence the extensive margin of loan demand with at least 90% confidence.”
Entrepreneurial finance: new frontiers of research and practice (2017, neutral): “This literature has tended to focus on studies at the so-called bottom of the pyramid and thus highlights the reduction of poverty as a key outcome of using microfinance (e.g. Robinson 2001).”
Microfinance and the Illusion of Development: From Hubris to Nemesis in Thirty Years (2012, positive): “This ‘new wave’ model (formally known as the ‘financial systems’ approach – see Robinson, 2001) quickly became the official definition of microfinance.”
Is Microfinance a ‘Magic Bullet’ for Women’s Empowerment? Analysis of Findings from South Asia (2005, background): “However, findings from both Imp-Act and other studies challenge the apparent corollary implication drawn by Hulme and Mosley as well as Robinson (2001) that the extreme poor will not benefit from access to financial services.”