Thursday, May 08, 2008

Microfinance & a Shameless Plug

I'm fairly satisfied directionally with my response to a particularly incendiary comment on microfinance by Chris MacRae who addresses the profits achieved in microfinance - it's also a great example of the ideological struggle currently taking place within microfinance:

> As Muhammad Yunus says, the purpose of microcredit was to get rid of
> loan sharks not to create more of them
>
> who cares- its the number 1 agenda of the 2000 people who meet at
> http://www.inamicrocreditsummit.org/
>
> why do I care - well my main profession is communications - I have
> noticed there is more than one way to takeover a market - one way is
> to take over the company that is making the world a better place; the
> other main way is to pollute the market with so much noise from big
> powers (in this case traditional banks, and do what the market
> (microcredit) was ororiginally designed to do
>
> the way to counter this is to treat every pariah of microcredit as you
> would any other criminal or abuser of humanity
If you're interested, you can find my response here (I didn't realize until just now that the postings are available publicly). It amounts to a long summary of my views on the commercialization of microfinance are and the successful IPO of Compartamos. Please excuse the length and lack of editing.

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