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New Fund for Women Is the Next Step in Kiva’s Evolution
Kiva partnered with the United States Department of State and the Inter-American Development Bank to launch the Women’s Entrepreneurship Fund on Friday, signaling the next step in the crowdfunding platform’s ongoing expansion into impact investing.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- crowdfunding, microfinance
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NexThought Monday – What Stands Between Women and Full Financial Inclusion?
Opening a bank account – as more than 200 million people have done since India's financial inclusion push – is an important first step toward empowerment. But simply having an account is not enough; many women in India own bank accounts but lack full freedom to use them.
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- Uncategorized
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Is more funding the answer to Pakistan’s struggling microfinance sector?
Microfinance is a booming industry in neighbouring India and Bangladesh, but has had a slower rise in Pakistan.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- South Asia
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Microfinance Clients Make Their Voices Heard: New research reveals their thoughts on how they’re treated by providers
The Smart Campaign has released the results from its Client Voices project, a four-country research investigation that directly asked clients about their experiences with financial providers and their thoughts on what constitutes good and bad treatment. The project features research from Georgia, Peru, Benin and Pakistan, based on face-to-face conversations with thousands of lower-income microfinance clients.
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- Uncategorized
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About 70% of Ghana’s ‘Susu’ Collectors Are Operating Illegally
Out of an estimated 1,500 Susu collectors operating in the country, with a client base of over 2 million, only 472 of them (representing 31 percent) are formally licenced under the self-regulation scheme, making t activities of the rest illegal.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- lending, microfinance
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Future Looks Gloomy for Ghana’s Microfinance Institutions
THE future looks gloomy for Ghana’s microfinance institutions as the country’s central bank cracks the whip on fly-night lenders that have mushroomed across the country.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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Uganda Preparing Law to Regulate Microfinance Institutions
Government is in advanced stages of establishing a law that will pave way for the formation of an autonomous institution that will license, regulate and supervise non-Microfinance Deposit Taking Institutions (MDIs), an official has disclosed.
- Categories
- Investing
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
- Tags
- microfinance, regulations
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Leaping Into the Future: Nigeria’s Rural Microfinance Community Gets Connected Using Stellar and Oradian
In the 1970s, microfinance began to take off as people started extending credit to small businesses and farmers as a way of getting them out of poverty. Microfinance works: the only problem is it's hard to scale; it's time-consuming and expensive to disburse and collect loans for instance. People are not able to transfer money within the country because they can't get normal bank accounts or afford to pay 20% for traditional remittance/money transfers.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
- Region
- Sub-Saharan Africa
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