Village Savings and Loan Associations

Hugh Allen, Mark Staehle

While many banks and microfinance institutions provide valuable services to the poor in the developing world, they are most successful in economically dynamic urban or peri-urban areas. 30 years since the start of the microfinance revolution, poor people who live in many rural areas and urban slu...

The Aid Chain

Tina Wallace, Lisa Bornstein, Jennifer Chapman

The Aid Chain explores the role of funding conditions in shaping co-operation and resistance as aid moves from donors, to NGOs, to local communities. Significant proportions of aid flow through the non-governmental sector but questions are increasingly being asked about the role of NGOs and whether...

What's Wrong with Microfinance?

Thomas Dichter, Malcolm Harper

Microfinance has been a long-lived development fashion and in 2005 it enjoyed the accolade of a UN International Year. Many of the world's biggest multinational banks are now eagerly committing quite substantial sums to it, for business as well as public relations purposes. However, there are some i...

Digital Poverty

Hernan Galperin, Judith Mariscal

This book represents the first publication of the Regional Dialogue on the Information Society (REDIS-DIRSI), a regional network of leading researchers concerned with the creation and dissemination of knowledge that supports effective participation in the Information Society by the poor and marginal...

The State They're In

Matthew Lockwood

Two years on from the Gleneagles G8: What has been achieved? What has changed? In July 2005 the first edition of Matthew Lockwood’s The State They’re In asked the key questions of the moment: What are the roots of poverty in Africa and what should now be done about it? How can a better understanding...

Policy Entrepreneurship for Poverty Reduction

Julius Court, Simon Maxwell

International development is characterized by a concern for praxis, the union of theory and practice. But bridging research and policy is harder than it looks. This book focuses on two key questions: What factors affect the influence research has on policy and practice in international development?...

Modelling the Impact of Trade Liberalisation

Lance Taylor

This hard-hitting research report presents a rigorous critique of the most widely used trade models based on computable general equilibrium (or CGE) models. The authors present concise analytical arguments explaining the fundamental weaknesses of typical CGE models. They show that these models tend...

Money with a Mission Volume 2

Alyson Brody, Martin Greeley, Katie Wright-Revolledo

This book reflects the implications of a social performance management agenda for the perspective of twelve partners from Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe, who participated in a three-year microfinance action-research programme known as Imp-Act. It features contributions from MFI staff who wor...

You Pay for What You Get

Markus Arbenz

Four case studies from ex-Soviet Union, Asia and Africa illustrate how development projects put their claim into practice.

Paying the Price

Arabella Fraser

Bethan Emmett

Progress towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals has fallen far short of the promises made in 2000. At the current rate, all but one of them will certainly be missed. The cost of failure will be high: 45 million more children will die between now and 2015 than would be the case if the world...