Microfinance is an industry that has fallen on hard times itself, since the controversial sacking of the Grameen Bank founder, Muhammad Yunus. However, microfinance has proven to be a powerful tool to help the world's poorest people to lift themselves out of poverty, and improve their entire family's nutrition, education and housing.
The State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign 2011 report indicates that 128 million of the world's poorest families had current loans at the end of 2009, demonstrating good progress towards reaching 175 million of the poorest families by 2015. This target is still very much achievable if micro-credit is properly managed, and not hijacked by the likes of loan sharks and profiteers.
Below Maree Nutt advocates for a more sensible and reasonable approach in utilising microfinance as a proven tool in the fight against poverty:
But Maree Nutt, the Australian national manager of the anti-poverty group Results, said micro-credit, carefully managed, benefited families, particularly as almost all borrowers are women.
''It's been proven more effective when that money goes to women, because women spend it more directly on benefiting the family, on what the family eat, on whether the kids go to school.''
Results has called for AusAid to more than double its micro-credit aid to $45 million a year by 2013.
('Poor can no longer bank on micro-credit', The Sydney Morning Herald, Ben Doherty, 9/4/2011)
Read some of the letters by some of our RESULTS members, backing microfinance, that have recently been published in the newspapers HERE.
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