Microfinance and Anti-Poverty Strategies for the Poor
José Garson

Read the book online!Poverty has become the primary concern of developing countries during the last decade. Unsustainable external deficits constrained most of these countries to enter into a painful structural adjustment process in the late 1980s.

Macroeconomic policies linked to structural adjustment processes, although subsequently oriented in ways that tended to limit or minimize social problems, could hardly bring about a lasting solution. Such policies support the traditional approach, in which poverty is deemed to be alleviated by top-down money transfers initiated by the State in the direction of the poor. Yet public money transferred to the poor can provide only short-term relief to their situation simply because nowhere is public (or donor) money in infinite supply.

The new bottom-up approach broadened the scope of anti-poverty policies and gave a special role to credit in the overall poverty-eradication process. Credit to finance private income-generating activities undertaken by the poor became an unlikely new tool in the fight against poverty in parallel to the traditional transfers of public funds.

The book provides a general overview of the scope and limits of the role of microfinance in policies aimed at poverty eradication.

Table of Contents

    1: Anti-Poverty Strategies: Scope and Limits of Credit
    An Operational Approach Defining Poverty
    Using credit to Generate Income
    Expanding the Role of Credit to Finance Basic Need
    Limits of Credit as an Instrument for Poverty Eradication
    Broadening the Perspective: From Credit to Microfinance

    2: Financial Intermediation at the Local Level
    Financial Intermediation in Developing Economies
    Specificity of Local Financial Intermediation
    Anti-Poverty Policies and Local financial Deepening

    3: Local Financial Infrastructure
    Local Banks Branches
    Self-Help Groups Emergence of Group in Finance
    Microfinance and Local Infrastructure

    4: Institutional Microfinance Strategies
    Microfinance at the Policy Level
    Taking a Network Approach at the Local Level
    Building the Capacity of the Local Financial Infrastructure

    5: Microfinance Instruments
    Refinancing Facilities and Savings Mobilization Refinancing Credit Operations
    Guarantee Facilities and Equity Build-up
    Combining refinancing and guarantee facilities at second-tier institutions
    End-of-Project Situations

    6: Conclusion
    The Challenges Ahead
    References
UNCDF Policy Series
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