In recent years there has been a rapid increase in the presence and growth of greenfield microfinance institutions in … Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper uses regressions to benchmark those African greenfields relative to other microfinance … comparable to the top microfinance institutions, and substantially increased their lending to women. The effects were especially …

Microfinance is generally seen as a way to fix credit markets and unleash the productive capacities of poor people who … are dependent on self-employment. The microfinance sector has grown quickly since the 1990s, paving the way for other …, generating a backlash against microfinance. This paper reconsiders the claims about microfinance, highlighting the diversity in …

This paper describes a new index of the quality of the business environment for microfinance institutions (the Global … Microscope on the Microfinance Business Environment). Regressions are used to validate the index by linking it and its … subcomponents to microfinance outcomes. The main findings are that the components of the index related to the supporting …

the first randomized controlled trial-based evidence on this question. Households in rural Bihar, India, were offered low …