In this Microfinance Gateway Highlight, Intellecap provides an overview of the active microfinance scene in the world's largest democracy - from its origins in Self-Help Groups and MFIs to today's hot investment opportunities.

Matt Flannery, cofounder of Kiva.org, a website that partners with microfinance institutions to allow people to loan money to entrepreneurs in the developing world, discusses the microfinance industry and its growing popularity among large financial institutions and the development community. He says the practice of providing financial services to the poor is not necessarily going to increase a country’s economic growth rate. Despite the high costs associated with making small loans, large fin more...

Client of ACCION partner Tchuma. Every day Senoda Bebana Machava works from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. selling soft drinks, beer and food at her bar, Centro Social. There are always customers asking for her specialty, cow’s head soup, seated at the tables and chairs outside under a metal roof canopy. Senoda worked for most of her life as a bank teller, but at 45 with the country in transition from a Marxist government, she was offered a small pension to retire.

She took the pension, but it wasn more...

Client of ACCION partner Akiba Commercial Bank. In the small town of Mango at the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Anna works tirelessly selling rice, oil, sugar and other food products out of her tiny storefront. Before owning her store, “life was miserable,” Anna explains. There was no work, and she resorted to asking for money in the street to take care of her parents and her daughter, Irene.

With a small loan from a relative, Anna began selling mangos and vegetables at the local market, but more...

ANF mission is to support the neediest sectors in Nicaragua by forging strategic alliances to procure quality goods and products, which are distributed to social service organizations that have been selected based on their effectiveness, transparency and spirit of service in an effort to achieve sustainable development through self sufficiency and the eradication of poverty.

The 2008 Skoll World Forum has wrapped up, but you can still virtually attend this pivotal social entrepreneurship conference by visiting Social Edge. A team of Skoll Scholars blogged every session and a roving group of three Berkeley Bloggers will brought home the bottom line from this year’s forum.

The 2008 Skoll World Forum sessions were centered around the theme of Social Entrepreneurship: culture, context and social change. If social entrepreneurship is truly about “changing the wo more...

Social Edge is an online program of the Skoll Foundation dedicated to inspiring and supporting social entrepreneurship around the world.

Unitus presents a series of case studies explaining how leading microfinance experts have tackled some of the most difficult social and economic problems in the developing world.

"The Skoll Foundation's mission is to advance systemic change to benefit communities around the world by investing in, connecting and celebrating social entrepreneurs. Social entrepreneurs are proven leaders whose approaches and solutions to social problems are helping to better the lives and circumstances of countless underserved or disadvantaged individuals."

Sharing the vision that everyone on this globe has access to inclusive financial services, microfinance is a solution. e-MFP, as a multi-stakeholder and well connected European microfinance community, has the mission to promote innovative and inclusive financial sectors in developing countries.