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Document Type: | General |
Publish Date: | 2013 |
Primary Author: | Joanna Ledgerwood |
Edited By: | Tabassum Rahmani |
Published By: | International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank |
It has been 15 years since the original Microfinance Handbook (Ledgerwood 1998) was written, and much has changed since then. Microfinance is now a household term with frequent articles in the media about its growth, innovation, and impact. The industry has grown exponentially, in terms of both the number of clients as well as the number and type of providers and products. The focus is no longer only on credit for investment in microenterprises: Today there is broad awareness that poor people have many and diverse financial service needs, which are typically met by a variety of providers through multiple financial services. We know this because data have much improved in the past 15 years, allowing us to better understand barriers to access and use, and we are beginning to examine impact. Over the years, the discourse has shifted from “microcredit” to “microfinance,”4 and now widespread concern for “financial inclusion”5 is directing attention to the broader “financial ecosystem” and how to make financial markets work better for the poor. For example, a recent CGAP Focus Note looks at the financial ecosystem within the context of the supply of financial services: “Different products present different risks and delivery challenges, and it is unlikely that a single class of service providers will effectively provide all the products poor people need. A key challenge is how to create the broader interconnected ecosystem of market actors and infrastructure needed for safe and efficient product delivery to the poor” (Ehrbeck et al. 2012, p. 1). To this end, policy makers have begun to address financial inclusion in their economic agendas with the belief that access to financial services improves the ability of consumers to access markets, which contributes to monetizing the values of products and services, enables risk pooling, and allows value storage, thus affecting economic growth and the overall stability of the system. Increasingly, best practice in microfinance is responsible finance, defined as the delivery of retail financial services in a transparent, inclusive, and equitable fashion (BMZ, CGAP, and IFC 2011). Consumer protection and financial capability are now seen as important policy objectives, particularly in a context of new providers, more sophisticated products, and technology- enabled delivery channels. Recent media attention to the significant profits made through initial public offerings of microfinance banks have highlighted the need for transparent pricing and appropriate interest rates.