Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings and checking accounts; microinsurance; and payment systems, among other services.

Microfinance services are designed to reach excluded customers, usually poorer population segments, possibly socially marginalized, or geographically more isolated, and to help them become self-sufficient. ID Ghana is an example of a microfinance institution.

Microfinance initially had a limited definition: the provision of microloans to poor entrepreneurs and small businesses lacking access to credit. The two main mechanisms for the delivery of financial services to such clients were: (1) relationship-based banking for individual entrepreneurs and small businesses; and (2) group-based models, where several entrepreneurs come together to apply for loans and other services as a group. Over time, microfinance has emerged as a larger movement whose object is: “a world in which as everyone, especially the poor and socially marginalized people and households have access to a wide range of affordable, high quality financial products and services, including not just credit but also savings, insurance, payment services, and fund transfers.

Proponents of microfinance often claim that such access will help poor people out of poverty, including participants in the Microcredit Summit Campaign. For many, microfinance is a way to promote economic development, employment and growth through the support of micro-entrepreneurs and small businesses; for others it is a way for the poor to manage their finances more effectively and take advantage of economic opportunities while managing the risks. Critics often point to some of the ills of micro-credit that can create indebtedness. Many studies have tried to assess its impacts.

New research in the area of microfinance call for better understanding of the microfinance ecosystem so that the microfinance institutions and other facilitators can formulate sustainable strategies that will help create social benefits through better service delivery to the low-income population.

Microfinance and poverty

In developing economies, and particularly in rural areas, many activities that would be classified in the developed world as financial are not monetized: that is, money is not used to carry them out. This is often the case when people need the services money can provide but do not have dispensable funds required for those services. This forces them to revert to other means of acquiring the funds. In their book, The Poor and Their Money, Stuart Rutherford and Sukhwinder Arora cite several types of needs:

1. Lifecycle Needs: such as weddings, funerals, childbirth, education, home building, holidays, festivals, widowhood and old age
2. Personal Emergencies: such as sickness, injury, unemployment, theft, harassment or death
3. Disasters: such as wildfires, floods, cyclones and man-made events like war or bulldozing of dwellings
4. Investment Opportunities: expanding a business, buying land or equipment, improving housing, securing a job, etc.

People find creative and often collaborative ways to meet these needs, primarily through creating and exchanging different forms of non-cash value. Common substitutes for cash vary from country to country, but typically include livestock, grains, jewelry and precious metals. As Marguerite S. Robinson describes in his book, The Micro Finance Revolution: Sustainable Finance for the Poor, the 1980s demonstrated that “micro finance could provide large-scale outreach profitably”, and in the 1990s, “micro finance began to develop as an industry”. In the 2000s, the microfinance industry’s objective was to satisfy the unmet demand on a much larger scale, and to play a role in reducing poverty. While much progress has been made in developing a viable, commercial microfinance sector in the last few decades, several issues remain that need to be addressed before the industry will be able to satisfy massive worldwide demand. The obstacles or challenges in building a sound commercial microfinance industry include:

• Inappropriate donor subsidies.
• Poor regulation and supervision of deposit-taking microfinance institutions (MFIs).
• Few MFIs that meet the needs for savings, remittances or insurance.
• Limited management capacity in MFIs.
• Institutional inefficiencies.
• Need for more dissemination and adoption of rural, agricultural microfinance methodologies.
• Members’ lack of collateral to secure a loan.

Microfinance is the proper tool to reduce income inequality, allowing citizens from lower socio-economical classes to participate in the economy. Moreover, its involvement has shown to lead to a downward trend in income inequality.

Ways in which poor people manage their money

Rutherford argues that the basic problem that poor people face as money managers is to gather a “usefully large” amount of money. Building a new home may involve saving and protecting diverse building materials for years until enough are available to proceed with construction. Children’s schooling may be funded by buying chickens and raising them for sale as needed for expenses, uniforms, bribes, etc. Because all the value is accumulated before it is needed, this money management strategy is referred to as “saving up”.

Often, people don’t have enough money when they face a need, so they borrow. A poor family might borrow from relatives to buy land, from a moneylender to buy rice, or from a microfinance institution to buy a sewing machine. Since these loans must be repaid by saving after the cost is incurred, Rutherford calls this ‘saving down’. Rutherford’s point is that microcredit is addressing only half the problem, and arguably the less important half: poor people borrow to help them save and accumulate assets. However, Microfinance is not the magical solution to take people out of poverty; it is merely a tool that the poor can use to raise their prospects for an escape from poverty.

Most needs are met through a mix of saving and credit. A benchmark impact assessment of Grameen Bank and two other large microfinance institutions in Bangladesh found that for every $1 they were lending to clients to finance rural non-farm micro- enterprise, about $2.50 came from other sources, mostly their clients’ savings. This parallels the experience in the West, in which family businesses are funded mostly from savings, especially during start-up.

Recent studies have also shown that informal methods of saving are unsafe. For example, a study by Wright and Mutesasira in Uganda concluded that “those with no option but to save in the informal sector are almost bound to lose some money—probably around one quarter of what they save there”.

The work of Rutherford, Wright and others has caused practitioners to reconsider a key aspect of the microcredit paradigm: that poor people get out of poverty by borrowing, building microenterprises and increasing their income. The new paradigm places more attention on the efforts of poor people to reduce their many vulnerabilities by keeping more of what they earn and building up their assets.

Examples

The microfinance project of “saving up” is exemplified in the slums of the south-eastern city of Vijayawada, India. This microfinance project functions as an unofficial banking system where Jyothi, a “deposit collector”, collects money from slum dwellers, mostly women, in order for them to accumulate savings. Jyothi does her rounds throughout the city, collecting Rs5 a day from people in the slums for 220 days, however not always 220 days in a row since these women do not always have the funds available to put them into savings. They ultimately end up with Rs1000 at the end of the process. However, there are some issues with this microfinance saving program. One of the issues is that while saving, clients are actually losing part of their savings. Jyothi takes interest from each client—about 20 out of every 220 payments, or Rs100 out of 1,100 or 9%. When these slum dwellers find someone they trust, they are willing to pay up to 30% to someone to safely collect and keep their savings. There is also the risk of entrusting their savings to unlicensed, informal, peripatetic collectors. However, the slum dwellers are willing to accept this risk because they are unable to save at home, and unable to use the remote and unfriendly banks in their country. This microfinance project also has many benefits, such as empowering women and giving parents the ability to save money for their children’s education. This specific microfinance project is an example of the benefits and limitations of the “saving up” project.

The microfinance project of “saving through” is shown in Nairobi, Kenya which includes a Rotating Savings and Credit Associations or ROSCAs initiative. This is a small scale example, however Rutherford (2009) describes a woman he met in Nairobi and studied her ROSCA. Every day 15 women would save 100 shillings so there would be a lump sum of 1,500 shillings and every day 1 of the 15 women would receive that lump sum. This would continue for 15 days and another woman within this group would receive the lump sum. At the end of the 15 days a new cycle would start. This ROSCA initiative is different from the “saving up” example above because there are no interest rates affiliated with the ROSCA, additionally everyone receives back what they put forth. This initiative requires trust and social capital networks in order to work, so often these ROSCAs include people who know each other and have reciprocity. The ROSCA allows for marginalized groups to receive a lump sum at one time in order to pay or save for specific needs they have.

Microfinance debates and challenges

There are several key debates at the boundaries of microfinance.

Loan Pricing

Before determining loan prices, one should take into account the following costs: 1) administrative costs by the bank (MFI) and 2) transaction cost by the client/customer. Customers, on the other hand, may have expenses for travelling to the bank branch, acquiring official documents for the loan application, and loss of time when dealing with the MFI (“opportunity costs”). Hence, from a customer’s point of view the cost of a loan is not only the interest and fees she/he has to pay, but also all other transaction costs that she/he has to cover.

One of the principal challenges of microfinance is providing small loans at an affordable cost. The global average interest and fee rate is estimated at 37%, with rates reaching as high as 70% in some markets. The reason for the high interest rates is not primarily cost of capital. Indeed, the local microfinance organizations that receive zero-interest loan capital from the online microlending platform Kiva charge average interest and fee rates of 35.21%. Rather, the main reason for the high cost of microfinance loans is the high transaction cost of traditional microfinance operations relative to loan size.

Microfinance practitioners have long argued that such high interest rates are simply unavoidable, because the cost of making each loan cannot be reduced below a certain level while still allowing the lender to cover costs such as offices and staff salaries. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa credit risk for microfinance institutes is very high, because customers need years to improve their livelihood and face many challenges during this time. Financial institutes often do not even have a system to check the person’s identity. Additionally, they are unable to design new products and enlarge their business to reduce the risk. The result is that the traditional approach to microfinance has made only limited progress in resolving the problem it purports to address: that the world’s poorest people pay the world’s highest cost for small business growth capital. The high costs of traditional microfinance loans limit their effectiveness as a poverty-fighting tool. Offering loans at interest and fee rates of 37% mean that borrowers who do not manage to earn at least a 37% rate of return may actually end up poorer as a result of accepting the loans.

According to a recent survey of microfinance borrowers in Ghana published by the Center for Financial Inclusion, more than one- third of borrowers surveyed reported struggling to repay their loans. Some resorted to measures such as reducing their food intake or taking children out of school in order to repay microfinance debts that had not proven sufficiently profitable.

In recent years, the microfinance industry has shifted its focus from the objective of increasing the volume of lending capital available, to address the challenge of providing microfinance loans more affordably. Microfinance analyst David Roodman contends that, in mature markets, the average interest and fee rates charged by microfinance institutions tend to fall over time. However, global average interest rates for microfinance loans are still well above 30%.

The answer to providing microfinance services at an affordable cost may lie in rethinking one of the fundamental assumptions underlying microfinance: that microfinance borrowers need extensive monitoring and interaction with loan officers in order to benefit from and repay their loans. The P2P microlending service Zidisha is based on this premise, facilitating direct interaction between individual lenders and borrowers via an internet community rather than physical offices. Zidisha has managed to bring the cost of microloans to below 10% for borrowers, including interest which is paid out to lenders. However, it remains to be seen whether such radical alternative models can reach the scale necessary to compete with traditional microfinance programs.

Benefits and limitations

Microfinancing produces many benefits for poverty stricken and low-income households. One of the benefits is that it is very accessible. Banks today simply won’t extend loans to those with little to no assets, and generally don’t engage in small size loans typically associated with microfinancing. Through microfinancing small loans are produced and accessible. Microfinancing is based on the philosophy that even small amounts of credit can help end the cycle of poverty. Another benefit produced from the microfinancing initiative is that it presents opportunities, such as extending education and jobs. Families receiving microfinancing are less likely to pull their children out of school for economic reasons. As well, in relation to employment, people are more likely to open small businesses that will aid the creation of new jobs. Overall, the benefits outline that the microfinancing initiative is set out to improve the standard of living amongst impoverished communities.

There are also many social and financial challenges for microfinance initiatives. For example, more articulate and better-off community members may cheat poorer or less-educated neighbours. This may occur intentionally or inadvertently through loosely run organizations. As a result, many microfinance initiatives require a large amount of social capital or trust in order to work effectively. The ability of poorer people to save may also fluctuate over time as unexpected costs may take priority which could result in them being able to save little or nothing some weeks. Rates of inflation may cause funds to lose their value, thus financially harming the saver and not benefiting the collector.

While the success of the Grameen Bank (which now serves over 7 million poor Bangladeshi women) has inspired the world, it has proved difficult to replicate this success. In nations with lower population densities, meeting the operating costs of a retail branch by serving nearby customers has proven considerably more challenging. Hans Dieter Seibel, board member of the European Microfinance Platform, is in favour of the group model. This particular model (used by many Microfinance institutions) makes financial sense, he says, because it reduces transaction costs. Microfinance programmes also need to be based on local funds.

Microfinance standards and principles

Poor people borrow from informal moneylenders and save with informal collectors. They receive loans and grants from charities. They buy insurance from state-owned companies. They receive funds transfers through formal or informal remittance networks. It is not easy to distinguish microfinance from similar activities. It could be claimed that a government that orders state banks to open deposit accounts for poor consumers, or a moneylender that engages in usury, or a charity that runs a heifer pool are engaged in microfinance. Ensuring financial services to poor people is best done by expanding the number of financial institutions available to them, as well as by strengthening the capacity of those institutions. In recent years there has also been increasing emphasis on expanding the diversity of institutions, since different institutions serve different needs.

Some principles that summarize a century and a half of development practice were encapsulated in 2004 by CGAP and endorsed by the Group of Eight leaders at the G8 Summit on 10 June 2004:

1. Poor people need not just loans but also savings, insurance and money transfer services.
2. Microfinance must be useful to poor households: helping them raise income, build up assets and/or cushion themselves against external shocks.
3. “Microfinance can pay for itself.” Subsidies from donors and government are scarce and uncertain and so, to reach large numbers of poor people, microfinance must pay for itself.
4. Microfinance means building permanent local institutions.
5. Microfinance also means integrating the financial needs of poor people into a country’s mainstream financial system.
6. “The job of government is to enable financial services, not to provide them.”
7. “Donor funds should complement private capital, not compete with it.”
8. “The key bottleneck is the shortage of strong institutions and managers.” Donors should focus on capacity building.
9. Interest rate ceilings hurt poor people by preventing microfinance institutions from covering their costs, which chokes off the supply of credit.
10. Microfinance institutions should measure and disclose their performance – both financially and socially.

Microfinance is considered a tool for socio-economic development, and can be clearly distinguished from charity. Families who are destitute, or so poor they are unlikely to be able to generate the cash flow required to repay a loan, should be recipients of charity. Others are best served by financial institutions.

Scale of microfinance operations

Yakub Opeyemi have impact on Microfinance Bank. No systematic effort to map the distribution of microfinance has yet been undertaken. A benchmark was established by an analysis of ‘alternative financial institutions’ in the developing world in 2004. The authors counted approximately 665 million client accounts at over 3,000 institutions that are serving people who are poorer than those served by the commercial banks. Of these accounts, 120 million were with institutions normally understood to practice microfinance. Reflecting the diverse historical roots of the movement, however, they also included postal savings banks (318 million accounts), state agricultural and development banks (172 million accounts), financial cooperatives and credit unions (35 million accounts) and specialized rural banks (19 million accounts).

Regionally, the highest concentration of these accounts was in India (188 million accounts representing 18% of the total national population). The lowest concentrations were in Latin America and the Caribbean (14 million accounts representing 3% of the total population) and Africa (27 million accounts representing 4% of the total population, with the highest rate of penetration in West Africa, and the highest growth rate in Eastern and Southern Africa ). Considering that most bank clients in the developed world need several active accounts to keep their affairs in order, these figures indicate that the task the microfinance movement has set for itself is still very far from finished.

By type of service, “savings accounts in alternative finance institutions outnumber loans by about four to one. This is a worldwide pattern that does not vary much by region.”

An important source of detailed data on selected microfinance institutions is the MicroBanking Bulletin, which is published by Microfinance Information Exchange. At the end of 2009, it was tracking 1,084 MFIs that were serving 74 million borrowers ($38 billion in outstanding loans) and 67 million savers ($23 billion in deposits).

Another source of information regarding the environment of microfinance is the Global Microscope on the Microfinance Business Environment, prepared by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), the Inter- American Development Bank, and others. The 2011 report contains information on the environment of microfinance in 55 countries among two categories, the regulatory framework and the supporting institutional framework. This publication, also known as the Microscope, was first developed in 2007, focusing only on Latin America and the Caribbean, but by 2009, this report had become a global study.

As yet there are no studies that indicate the scale or distribution of ‘informal’ microfinance organizations like ROSCA’s and informal associations that help people manage costs like weddings, funerals and sickness. Numerous case studies have been published, however, indicating that these organizations, which are generally designed and managed by poor people themselves with little outside help, operate in most countries in the developing world.

Help can come in the form of more and better-qualified staff, thus higher education is needed for microfinance institutions. This has begun in some universities, as Oliver Schmidt describes. Mind the management gap.