Why does IFAD need rural finance guidelines? With its exclusive emphasis on rural poverty alleviation, IFAD enjoys a competitive advantage over other development agencies, and should strengthen its role by providing support for the development of rural finance as an important instrument. The...

Agricultural development banks were established to extend credit and other financial services to customers considered noncreditworthy by the commercial banking sector. Although frequently unprofitable, they play an important role in the fight against rural poverty. This article asks if these...

Values are to a society what character is to a person: it reveals his true inner self, yet is difficult to describe in exact terms. Moreover, a person's character may show in his actions in various, sometimes contradictory ways so that it may be difficult to induce a person's character from his...

Bangladesh is one of the poorest countries in the world; and women in that country are among the poorest of the poor. In the late 1970s, a man performed a miracle there. With a few loans out of his own pocket in 1976, Professor Yunus proved to himself that even the most downtrodden are able to...

Microfinance comprises microsavings, microcredit and other financial services such as microinsurance and microleasing. Small amounts of savings are collected: daily, weekly, at market days, after harvests or irregularly. They are then transformed into microloans which are repaid in...

By the mid-1970s, in virtually all of Africa, strategies of modernization and technology transfer had clearly failed to initiate self-sustained processes of development. Government intervention and centralized planning had spurred economic disaster, rather than growth. In the world of finance,...

Au cours de la moitié des années 1970, dans presque toute l'Afrique les stratégies de la modernisation et du transfert de la technologie n'ont pas réussi – initier les processus d'autosuffisance. L'intervention du Gouvernement et la planification centralisée ont précipité le désastre...

Forays into Islamic microfinance have been few and scattered and of limited outreach. Some have been mandated by the state, but lack popular demand, as in Iran; other have emerged in response to popular demand, but lack regulatory support by the state, as in Syria. This has provided the...

Mali, with a population of 11.7m, 70 percent rural, is located in the Sahel zone of West Africa. With a per capita income of US$245 and a Human Development Index rank of 174, it is among the poorest countries in the world, highly vulnerable to external impacts.

Linking banks and self-help groups has been a major program of German development cooperation since the mid-1980s. Given the involvement of GTZ in SHG banking and the outreach of that program in India, the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has proposed to study the...