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 important problems which risk being ignored or are fleetingly observed but then swept under the carpet in the current euphoria. The authors sound a timely and overdue warning to governments, bankers, donors and the general public and urges people to pause, reassess their expectations, re-think some policies and to recognise that microfinance is never a panacea and may sometimes be actively damaging to its intended customers. This important book will be of interest to students of microfinance, microfinance practitioners internationally, bankers, government ministries and NGO donor agencies, training institutions, and academics in finance, economics and sociology.
Published: 2007
Pages: 288
eBook: 9781780440446
Paperback: 9781853396670
| Introduction 1 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Thomas Dichter | |||
| Part One: Clients | |||
| 1. Can microcredit make an already slippery slope more slippery? | |||
| Some lessons from the social meaning of debt 9 | |||
| Thomas Dichter | |||
| 2. Is microdebt good for poor people? A note on the dark side of | |||
| microfinance 19 | |||
| David Hulme | |||
| 3. Imagining microfinance more boldly: Unleashing the true | |||
| potential of microfinance 23 | |||
| Imran Matin, Munshi Sulaiman and M. A. Saleque | |||
| 4. What’s wrong with groups? 35 | |||
| Malcolm Harper | |||
| 5. Finance begins with savings, not loans 49 | |||
| Hugh Allen | |||
| 6. ‘Institutionalizing suspicion’: The management and governance | |||
| challenge in user-owned microfinance groups 61 | |||
| Susan Johnson and Namrata Sharma | |||
| 7. SHGs in India: Numbers yes, poverty outreach and empowerment, | |||
| partially 73 | |||
| Frances Sinha | |||
| 8. Microfinance and farmers: Do they fit? 83 | |||
| Malcolm Harper | |||
| Part Two: Institutions | |||
| 9. The moneylender’s dilemma 97 | |||
| Kim Wilson | |||
| 10. Princes, peasants and pretenders: The past and future of African | |||
| microfinance 109 | |||
| Paul Rippey | |||
| 11. Microfinance under crisis conditions: the case of Bolivia 121 | |||
| Irina Aliaga and Paul Mosley | |||
| 12. Methodenstreit and sustainability in microfinance: Generalizations | |||
| describing institutional frameworks 137 | |||
| J. D. Von Pischke | |||
| 13. Microfinance: Some conceptual and methodological problems 149 | |||
| David Ellerman | |||
| 14. Learning from the Andhra Pradesh crisis 163 | |||
| Prabhu Ghate | |||
| Part Three: Expectations | |||
| 15. The chicken and egg dilemma in microfinance: An historical | |||
| analysis of the sequence of growth and credit in the economic | |||
| development of the ‘north’ 179 | |||
| Thomas Dichter | |||
| 16. A practitioner’s view of the challenges facing NGO-based | |||
| microfinance in Bangladesh 193 | |||
| S. M. Rahman | |||
| 17. De-industrialization and social disintegration in Bosnia 207 | |||
| Milford Bateman | |||
| 18. Measuring the impact of microfinance 225 | |||
| Richard L. Meyer | |||
| vi CONTENTS | |||
| CONTENTS vii | |||
| 19. From microcredit to livelihood finance 241 | |||
| Vijay Mahajan | |||
| 20. Opportunity and evolution for microfinance 251 | |||
| Mary Houghton and Ronald Grzywinski | |||
| Some final thoughts 257 | |||
| Malcolm Harper | |||
| Index 261 |
Thomas Dichter
Thomas Dichter has spent half of his 40-year career in international development working in microfinance on three continents. From 1994 to 1998 he was senior consultant to the World Bank’s ‘Sustainable Banking With the Poor’ project. He is the author of Despite Good Intentions: Why Development Assistance to the Third World has Failed.
Malcolm Harper
Malcolm Harper taught at Cranfield School of Management until 1995, and since then has worked mainly in India. He has published on enterprise development and microfinance. He was Chairman of Basix Finance from 1996 until 2006, and is Chairman of M-CRIL, the microfinance credit rating agency.
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