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Time to Grow Up: Financing SMEs With Local Capital
While impact investing and multilateral SME financing are encouraging trends, could they also undermine the journey to adulthood for financial sectors in developing economies? Too much foreign capital from impact investors or multilateral development banks could stunt the growth of financial sectors to can finance SMEs on their own.
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Charting the Future at Women’s World Banking
In the final post of a wide-ranging interview, Mary Ellen Iskenderian, president and CEO of Women’s World Banking, discusses expansion at the organization to include multi-product servcies to individuals and explains why consolidation in would benefit the microfinance sector in the long term.
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The Results Are In: Devex Top 40 Development Innovators
Devex is delighted to present the Top 40 Development Innovators. At the core of this initiative is a survey of aid workers and international development professionals designed to recognize the most innovative of the world’s leading international development organizations. Today, the survey is complete and the results are in!
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- Health Care
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Can Microfinance Ignite a Good Governance Epidemic?
By serving as examples of effective corporate governance, microfinance providers could succeed where so many financial institutions have failed and in ’infect’ their client and community networks with the ’disease’ of strong corporate governance. With almost 3 billion unbanked people still to reach, those are huge potential networks to infect.
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Going to See ’To Catch A Dollar’? Tell Us What You Think
Tonight - March 31 - and only tonight, the curtain will go up on the documentary, To Catch a Dollar, in movie theaters around the United States. The film documents the travels of Muhammad Yunus as the Nobel Laurate spreads the word on microfinance - not in Bangladesh, India or Asia - but here ... in America.
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NextThought: Quick Reflections from Harvard’s Social Enterprise Conference
The students of Harvard met and exceeded expectations at their annual Social Enterprise Conference through a healthy mix of panel discussions, hands-on workshops and a student-driven entrepreneurial spirit that was palpable in every hallway.
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- Finance, Social Enterprise
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Bananas Over Corporate Governance: The 2011 Banana Skins Survey
In the recently published Microfinance Banana Skins 2011, subtitled "Losing its fairy dust," the third annual survey polls microfinance practitioners, investors, analysts, regulators, and other experts on the top risks facing the industry worldwide. Corporate governance is ranked the fourth highest risk - up from seventh a year ago.
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NextThought Monday: How Can I Pay My Loans If I Can’t Afford an Onion?
Sure, one might argue that growing debts and high interest rates have lead to suicides in India and rising default rates. Perhaps you may even conclude that greed finally got the better of the MFIs. But when I visited Andhra Pradesh and almost couldn’t afford a watermelon, I gained a whole new perspective on the MFI crisis.
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- Finance
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- lending, microfinance