We examine how participation in a microfinance program diffuses through social networks. We collected detailed demographic and social network data in 43 villages in South India before microfinance was introduced in those villages and then tracked eventual participation. We exploit exogenous variation in the importance (in a network sense) of the people who were first informed about the program,...

Microfinance has come to play a major role in many gender and development strategies because of its direct relationship to both poverty alleviation and to the empowerment of women. Women are the most crucial elements of the social fabric and are playing a pivotal role in the socioeconomic scenario of Rajasthan. Microfinance programs like the SHGs in India have been promoted for their positive e...

Microfinance is gathering momentum to become a major force in India. The self-help group (SHG) model with bank lending to groups of (often) poor women without collateral has become an accepted part of rural finance. The paper discusses the state of SHG-based microfinance in India. With traditionally loss-making rural banks shifting their portfolio away from the rural poor in the post-reform per...

In rich countries, lenders often rely on credit scoring—formulae to predict risk based on the performance of past loans with characteristics similar to current loans—to inform decisions and to control costs. Can credit scoring do the same for microfinance lenders in poor countries? This paper argues that scoring does have a place in microfinance. Although scoring is less powerful in poor countr...

Can scoring models help microlenders in poor countries as much as they have helped credit-card lenders in rich countries? This paper presents a scorecard that predicts the probability that loans from a microlender in Bolivia will have arrears of 15 days or more. Although arrears in microfinance depend on many factors difficult to include in scorecards, the paper shows that inexpensive, simple-t...

Gender discrimination is a persistent problem faced by women all over the world, which has ledto the need to empower women for uplifting their status as recognized by Millennium Development Goals (2010). The present study focuses on the role of microfinance in empowering women and also acknowledges its’ significance in alleviating poverty. The researcher used qualitative approach and case study...

Bangladesh has been a pioneer in the microfinance movement since its inception in the early 1980s, and today this concept has been adopted by many countries including China, India, and Brazil. It is already proven as strong and useful poverty reduction tools by researchers worldwide. Conversely, Online Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending, also known as online social lending is a new form of electronic c...

Action Research Programme (RADAR), School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. L.A. Morison is with the Infectious Disease Epidemiology Unit, Department of Infectious and Tropical Diseases, LSHTM (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine), C. Watts is with the Health Policy Unit, Department of Public Health and Policy, LSHTM, and J.D.H. Porter is with the Clini...

The Grameen Bank has attracted worldwide attention by providing small loans to poor people across rural villages in Bangladesh. In 2006 the Nobel Committee awarded the Grameen Bank and its founder Professor Mohammad Yunus the Nobel Peace Prize for their, “efforts to create economic and social development from below.”[1] The Nobel committee asserted that microfinance is “an important liberating ...

Microfinance is not a new development. Its origin can be traced back to 1976, when Muhammad Yunus set up the Grameen Bank, as experiment, on the outskirts of Chittagong University campus in the village of Jobra, Bangladesh. Since then several microfinance institutions came up and have succeeded in reaching the poorest of the poor, and have devised new ground-breaking strategies with time for th...