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Displaying all posts under the topic of Overindebtedness
May 24, 2013
New & Noteworthy
Below are the latest and greatest articles, reports, and research from the field of microfinance and economic development. From remittances in Asia to microinsurance in Africa, it’s definitely been an interesting week!
March 27, 2013
Worse than AP: The Damage of a Repayment Crisis in Chiapas
A month ago I wrote a post singling out the Mexican state of Chiapas as a potential site of a coming repayment crisis. No, this is not a follow-up announcing that it has begun, nor am I rooting for one to start. In my next post, I will review the options that the Mexican microfinance sector has to avoid it, and what the global microfinance community can do to help.
February 14, 2013
What’s Next: Another Repayment Crisis?
It's been over two years since the start of the great India insolvency. Four years since the Bosnia blight and No Pago Nicaragua. And nearly six years since the Morocco microfinance meltdown.
At this point, it's reasonable to say that the first global crisis in microfinance has passed. Life is on the mend.
January 15, 2013
Banking the World: Empirical Foundations of Financial Inclusion
About 2.5 billion adults, just over half the world’s adult population, lack bank accounts. If we are to realize the goal of extending banking and other financial services to this vast “unbanked” population, we need to consider not only such product innovations as microfinance and mobile banking but also issues of data accuracy, impact assessment, risk mitigation, technology adaptation, financial literacy, and local context.
January 31, 2012
Sanjay Sinha: A Rough Year for Microfinance
The microcredit movement is premised on the idea that access to capital will be liberating, empowering, and profit-making. But as the Indian microfinance sector closed out another year, it’s hard to be so ebullient.
If there’s one microfinance word that rose above all others in 2011, it’s overindebtedness. As of the time of writing, it racks up the highest count on CGAP blog’s tag cloud (not counting generic terms like “microfinance”). It seems fitting, then, to start 2012 with a blog post on this very subject.
October 14, 2011
ideas42 on Turning Interest Into Savings
Low-income households are often trapped in a “debt-cycle”: They borrow to cover necessary expenses, repay the loan with their subsequent income, then borrow again because they have nothing remaining after repayment. Inconsistent income and seasonality, especially for farmers, makes borrowing attractive at the time of necessity. However, the associated interest costs may stifle the chances for the borrower to accumulate savings.
September 14, 2011
Rethinking Multiple Borrowing
Some time ago, I had a conversation with a microfinance investor. What is the greatest challenge facing the sector? – I asked. His answer: multiple borrowing – multiple borrowing was getting people into too much debt; multiple borrowing was transforming micro-enterprise lending into consumer finance; and multiple borrowing was rewriting the traditional relationship between MFIs and their clients.
March 2, 2011
Links We Like
Here’s our shortlist of links (in no particular order) that we thought were interesting or relevant to the microfinance sector. This is by no means a complete list, so if we missed something important, please feel free to add it in the comments. And if you’re looking for a media round-up of the Yunus-Bangladeshi government dispute, check out Financial Access Initiative in the News.
We featured the perspectives of some of the conference organizers on Day 1’ s highlights. Here are some additional perspectives on Day 2:
Jonathan Morduch, Financial Access Initiative