What's wrong with microfinance?

Microfinance has been a long-lived development fashion and in 2005 it enjoyed the accolade of a UN International Year. Many of the world's biggest multinational banks are now eagerly committing quite substantial sums to it, for business as well as public relations purposes. However, there are some important problems which risk being ignored or are fleetingly observed but then swept under the carpet in the current euphoria. The authors sound a timely and overdue warning to governments, bankers, donors and the general public and urges people to pause, reassess their expectations, re-think some policies and to recognise that microfinance is never a panacea and may sometimes be actively damaging to its intended customers.--Publisher.

Can microcredit make an already slippery slope more slippery? : some lessons from the social meaning of debt / Thomas Dichter -- Is microdebt good for poor people? : a note on the dark side of microfinance / David Hulme -- Imagining microfinance more boldly : unleashing the true potential of microfinance / Imran Matin, Munshi Sulaiman and M.A. Saleque -- What's wrong with groups? / Malcolm Harper -- Finance begins with savings, not loans / Hugh Allen -- 'Institutional suspicion' : the management and governance challenge in user-owned microfinance groups / Susan Johnson and Namrata Sharma -- SHG's in India : numbers yes, poverty outreach and empowerment, partially / Frances Sinha -- Microfinance and farmers : do they fit? / Malcolm Harper -- The moneylender's dilemma / Kim Wilson -- Princes, peasants and pretenders : the past and future of African microfinance / Paul Rippey -- Microfinance under crisis conditions : the case of Bolivia / Irina Aliaga and Paul Mosley -- Methodenstreit and sustainability in microfinance : generalizations describing institutional frameworks / J.D. von Pischke -- Microfinance : some conceptual and methodological problems / David Ellerman -- Learning fro…