The Grameen Bank of Bangladesh is widely considered as one of the world's most sucessful financial institutions banking with the poor. In an effort to alleviate poverty, donors have supported replication programs in 26 countries. This analysis is based on some case studies from Indonesia, the...

Our knowledge about microfinance in developing countries has been greatly enriched in recent years by the experience of numerous institutions. Different sound technologies and practices of financial services to all segments of the population have emerged; there is no single best practice or...

We in the community of microfinance specialists want to help alleviate poverty. We think microfinance is a useful tool. Yet, by bringing these two concerns together, we might be mixing up two diverging ends: one is poverty reduction; the other one the development of a healthy microfinance...

The evidence from selected Asian countries shows that: ? Microfinance on the whole has weathered the crisis well. The strongest of the microfinance systems in the region, the BRI unit system in Indonesia, has emerged from the crisis even stronger than before, characterized by a surge in savings...

Rural and agricultural banks, among them state-owned agricultural development banks (AgDBs) and cooperative banks, have a wide outreach in Asian countries. Their potential as retailers and wholesalers (through cooperatives, rural banks, NGOs) for providing sustainable savings deposit and credit...

In a number of European countries microfinance evolved from informal beginnings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a type of banking of the poor, juxtaposed to the commercial and private banking sector. Almost from the onset, microfinance meant financial intermediation between...

The case of BRI is evidence that, in a deregulated policy environment, the microfinance section of a government-owned bank can (a) be transformed into a highly profitable, self-reliant financial intermediary; and (b) turn into a major microfinance provider, offering carefully crafted...