David Roodman's book, Due Diligence, shapes today's public conversation about microfinance. Time magazine, The Washington Post and others, have picked up on the book and its message. With, as his subtitle says, an impertinent but serious, approach, Roodman's book attempts to answer a basic question: Does microfinance work?...

Ask a casual observer to describe microfinance, and most likely he or she will mention Bangladesh and tiny group-guaranteed loans for women. But on a recent trip to Bangladesh, I learned that the Bangladeshi microfinance sector has moved on. Way on.

The model of microfinance in Bangladesh, as it...

Judging from last year's lobbying by the financial sector to block the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one would think banks are just plain anti-consumer protection regulation, almost by reflex. That's why it is so encouraging to see the global microfinance industry embrace a campaign to promote strong consumer protection...

Financial inclusion is one of today's development buzzwords. Policymakers and central bankers gather in forums like the Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI) and the G-20's Global Partnership for Financial Inclusion to talk about how to build inclusive financial systems. Everyone wants to get in on the act. However, there is...

Vijay Mahajan, founder of the microfinance institution BASIX, and widely regarded as the dean of Indian microfinance, is walking the hot and dusty roads of rural India in his kurta pajama and sandals, and as he's walking he's thinking about the microfinance industry's tough year. A crisis of overindebtedness among...

Like sex, microfinance can be safe if practiced responsibly. Recently, however, we've seen that not all participants in the microfinance industry are practicing safe microfinance. As happens with that other risky activity, the players in microfinance face temptations that lure them away from healthy long term relationships. One need look...

Microfinance in India is undergoing a crisis caused by a toxic mix of mushrooming growth and political volatility. As they ponder their next steps, participants in the Indian microfinance sector would do well to examine another crisis that touched microfinance, in Bolivia in the years 1999 and 2000....

When a story on microfinance appears in major media outlets, the effect on the public image of the sector can be dramatic. That's why last Friday's article in the Wall Street Journal, "India's Major Crisis in Microlending," requires a response.

The story covers a microfinance crisis in the...

"The industry is trying to fix itself right now" Elizabeth Warren, speaking on "In Business with Margaret Brennan"

Dear Ms.Warren,

What an important challenge you face in bringing the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into being! Although you're reputed to be a woman not easily daunted, it might...

The recent IPO of SKS Microfinance, India's largest microfinance institution (MFI), was a watershed event whose ripples are affecting the public perception of microfinance. When an organization originally founded as a nonprofit first attracts some $75 million in successive waves of private equity capital and then raises $358...

While academics from prestigious East Coast universities are developing randomized trials to test the impact of microfinance on poverty - and coming up only with modest-sounding results, Martín Burt, the founder of Fundación Paraguaya , is making a bold leap. Not content to measure poverty impact, or even...

Most people with a lively interest in microfinance know that the majority of microloans dispensed throughout the world today come from for-profit microfinance institutions, rather than donation-dependent non-governmental organizations (NGOs).

What may be less recognized is how these for-profit MFIs were born. Many of the world's largest and most successful...

Can a person with a disability living in a developing country become the valued client of a financial institution? According to Harvard Law professor Michael Stein, 650 million people around the world, nearly 10 percent of humanity, have a disability, and over 80 percent of these people live in developing...

What's the impact of microfinance? A question with 150 million answers, one for every client around the world who receives microfinance services.

Academics who wield sophisticated statistical tools to assess complex social phenomena like microfinance give answers with more precision, but they don't always spend much time explaining their...

Populist governments across Latin America are re-shaping the environment in which microfinance institutions (MFIs) provide financial services to low income people. The proposals of these governments are similar -interest rate caps that are politically attractive but unfeasible, public intervention in financial services (as they have nationalized other industries) and a...

Americans often suffer sticker shock when they hear about interest rates charged in international microfinance. At annualized rates above 20 percent, most Americans start getting uncomfortable, and when they hear that in some places annual rates rise as high as 100 percent or even more, their moral outrage beepers start...

When does a borrower cross the line from leveraged into losing it? Every borrower wants to avoid sliding into debt stress. Lenders, too, have a stake in ensuring that their clients cope successfully with their debt burdens.

If no one wants debt stress, why is there so much of...

Lately the microfinance industry has come under a lot of scrutiny, but media coverage doesn't reveal the full picture. A recent New York Times article painted microfinance an industry overrun by big banks that charge eye-popping interest rates.

First, a couple of misperceptions have to be cleared...