About Micro Finance
The Micro finance Revolution: Sustainable Finance for the poor....An emerging investment opportunity...Creating a World Without Poverty.... Undermining Rural Development with Cheap Credit
Most criticisms of micro finance have actually been criticisms of micro credit, delivered in the absence of other microfinance services such as savings, remittances, payments and insurance.
Microfinance is the provision of financial services to low-income clients or solidarity lending groups including consumers and the self-employed, who traditionally lack access to banking and related services.
More broadly, it is a movement whose object is "a world in which as many poor and near-poor households as possible have permanent access to an appropriate range of high quality financial services, including not just credit but also savings, insurance, and fund transfers."Those who promote microfinance generally believe that such access will help poor people out of poverty.
Microfinance is a broad category of services, which includes microcredit. Microcredit is provision of credit services to poor clients. Although microcredit is one of the aspects of microfinance, conflation of the two terms is epidemic in public discourse. Critics often attack microcredit while referring to it indiscriminately as either 'microcredit' or 'microfinance'. Due to the broad range of microfinance services, it is difficult to assess impact, and very few studies have tried to assess its full impact.
Microfinance is the practice of providing small scale financial services to the world's poor, mainly loans and savings and increasingly other products like insurance and money transfer. Worldwide there are an estimated 10,000 Micro Finance Institutions, with charters ranging from nonprofit NGOs to Credit Unions and Commercial Banks. The 1,300 MFIs who at the end of 2008 were reporting to the Microfinance Information exchange (MIX) have 70 million borrowers and a similar number of savers. Total loan portfolio stands at US$ 40bn. In the past years key volume indicators have been growing by 20-30% per year, more in some countries. The stock of foreign capital invested in the sector, which more than tripled to US$ 4bn between 2004 and 2006, keeps on growing and now stands at over US$ 10bn. Much of it is held by specialized microfinance investment vehicles, with an increasing proportion coming from the private sector that sees investment in microfinance as an attractive asset. The industry has definitely entered into a stage of commercialization although at the same time there is increasing interest in running operations .
