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You Need a Banking Law to Create a Bank for the Poor
Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank and a proponent of 'social business', a not-for-profit business model to combat unemployment and other social evils, does not mince his words when it comes to micro-credit for the poor. The Nobel Peace Prize winner is dismissive about some recent innovations in the microfinance sector and warns about the direction they are taking. He also believes that micro-credit should be kept outside political influence to run it as a sound financial institution. "The best scenario," he says, "is when a micro-credit bank is owned by the poor." Excerpts from an interview with Shamni Pande:
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- South Asia
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What Brazil and Malaysia Can Teach the U.S. About Financial Inclusion
When people think about financial inclusion, their minds tend to go first to highly-publicized unbanked regions in Africa and parts of Asia. But many people right here in the United States lack access to traditional financial services.
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Weekly Roundup – 6 Mobile Finance Innovations (That Have Nothing to Do With Apple): While the U.S. obsesses over the latest gadget, mobile finance accelerates around the world
Lately, the digital payments conversation in the U.S. seems to revolve around whatever Apple is doing. But while we discuss the latest gadget, mobile finance innovation is exploding in countries around the world. We highlight six intriguing recent developments affecting countries from China to Kenya in this roundup.
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Pakistan’s Largest Conventional Bank is Expected to Enter the Microfinance Sector
Habib Bank (HBL) is expected to enter the microfinance banking segment by acquiring Pakistan’s second largest microfinance bank in terms of the value of savings, according to a regulatory filing by the country’s biggest commercial bank on Thursday.
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Microfinance Companies to Be Hit by Mergers and Acquisitions in Ghana
Ghana’s microfinance industry is expected to be hit by mergers and acquisitions as the regulator demands recapitalization of companies in the sector.
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- Sub-Saharan Africa
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- microfinance
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Calls Grow for a New Microloans Model
Some of the world’s top experts in microlending recently gathered to debate a hot topic: Has the microloan boom of the last decade actually helped global efforts to lift people out of poverty?
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INTERVIEW: Muhammad Yunus discusses the Indian microfinance industry
The Nobel laureate and founder of microfinance pioneer Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank says MFIs in India could be greedy and tapping the capital market or raising loans from private equity funds is a bad idea.
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- South Asia
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Microfinance Goes Digital: Opportunities and challenges in enabling pro-poor financial institutions to connect to the digital ecosystem
Mobile financial services are finally moving beyond payments, with 26 mobile savings and 37 mobile credit services now live. But in spite of this progress, smaller microfinance institutions and other pro-poor organizations have been forced to watch from the sidelines for lack of resources. Grameen Foundation addresses this and other challenges in the first post in a series on what it takes for an MFI to go digital.
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