Microcredit Makes Strong Inroads in Latin America and Caribbean, by Gustavo Gonz?lez

Tuesday, May 3, 2005

Yunus, who founded the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh in 1976, once again pointed out that the lowest-income clients have the highest payback rates of all, when they are given access to loans at reasonable interest rates, without having to put up collateral.
He also underlined that 56 percent of the Grameen Bank’s clients in Bangladesh (who are mainly women) have been able to leave behind extreme poverty.
According to the main report presented at the summit, of the 54.8 million poor clients reached by the microcredit system worldwide in 2003, 82.5 percent were women.
The number of poor women who have benefited from microloans rose from 10.3 million in 1999 to 45.2 million in 2003. Of that total, 719,000 were in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Story found here.

Source: IPS