Financial Transparency Coalition

The initial swell of enthusiasm for microfinance has somewhat subsided recently, as an elegantly simple idea founders on the rocks of reality. Despite the early successes of projects such as Muhammad Yunus’s Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, billions of people from Dhaka to the Dominican Republic remain shut out of the global financial system. The scarcity of credit available to the world’s poorest is still a significant impediment to ending global poverty. The current crisis in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh is a case in point. A rash of defaults- and even suicides- among borrowers have led to...