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Africa’s Banks Pressured by Bad Loans
Africa’s banks are under pressure from non-performing loans, credit agency Moody’s said on Tuesday.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- lending
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Microfinance in a Dangerous World
Held in the aftermath of the brutal Paris terrorist attacks, last week's European Microfinance Week conference had a special resonance. But the event also provided a hopeful response to recent grim headlines: it brought a strong focus to the ways the microfinance industry and broader financial inclusion movement can lessen the tensions that drive global conflicts – and how they can help communities recover when natural or man-made disasters strike.
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- Uncategorized
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Are e-Wallets Beginning to Worry Banks in India?
In the last week of October, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma received a message from State Bank of India (SBI). It wasn’t good news. The message said the nation’s largest lender and its associate banks would no longer allow their customers to load money from their accounts onto the Paytm wallet.
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- Technology
- Region
- South Asia
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Health Care Dominates Borrowing in Global South
With policyMakers in emerging market economies stepping up the focus on financial inclusion, India and China have seen the strongest growth in account ownership between 2011 and 2014. If the findings of the World Bank-Gallup Global Findex Survey 2014, which asked over 1,50,000 respondents in 143 countries how and why they access financial services, were to be plotted on a map though, there is a very clear North-South divide in terms of where people spend their borrowed money.
- Categories
- Health Care
- Region
- South Asia
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From Interior Design to Microfinance in South Sudan
On a warm afternoon in this dirt-road town, 34-year-old Missy Williams sits on a plastic chair beneath a thatched roof in the center of a bustling market.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- lending, microfinance
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IDB Loans $10M to Paraguay’s Vision Banco to Fund Water, Sanitation Facilities for Low-Income Populations
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), a US-based multilateral finance institution that operates in Latin America and the Caribbean, recently approved a loan of USD 10 million to Vision Banco, a microfinance institution (MFI) in Paraguay. The loan will be disbursed from IDB’s Opportunities for the Majority Sector facility, which lends, invests equity, offers technical advice and provides partial guarantees and risk-sharing facilities to “companies, financial intermediaries … [and] non-profits that are willing to engage with the base of the socioeconomic pyramid”[4].
- Categories
- Agriculture, Health Care
- Region
- Latin America
- Tags
- lending, microfinance
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Zimbabwe to Reform Banking Industry
Zimbabwe is finalising new laws aimed at strengthening its fragile banking industry through measures such as imposing shareholding restrictions and revamping oversight functions to guard against insider loans.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- lending
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This Indonesian Microfinance Startup Wants to Put Loan Sharks Out of Business
In Indonesia, 203 million people are classified as poor, living on less than US$4.50 per day. This group of consumers is not the section of the economic pyramid that conventional banks and insurance companies tend to prioritize, despite their making up the majority of the archipelago’s population. This is a problem Aidil Zulkifli, co-founder and CEO of UangTeman, hopes to solve.
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- Uncategorized
- Region
- Asia Pacific