Research & Analysis

Regulation and Supervision of Microfinance Institutions

There is a huge unmet demand for financial services in the microenterprise sector. Despite some success stories, MFIs probably reach fewer than 5 percent of the potential clients.

The Missing Links: Financial Systems

The paradigms, approaches, and recommended actions outlined in this report represent a strong consensus among the world’s financial leaders who participated, the world’s leading microfinance institutions, and the world’s low-income entrepreneurs.

Maximizing the Outreach of Microenterprise Finance: Emerging Lessons

The conventional view has held that microenterprise finance helps poor people and therefore is a desirable development activity but that it cannot be financially viable. Small loans, it is said, are simply too costly to administer, and the profits from such lending too meager to permit profitability. However, a study examining some of the best microfinance institutions concludes that this conventional wisdom is quite wrong.