Publication

Mar 2011

For more than 30 years microfinance has been portrayed as a key policy and programme intervention for poverty reduction and ‘bottom-up’ local economic and social development. Microfinance (more accurately microcredit, but in practice the terms are interchangeable) is the provision of tiny loans to the poor to help them establish or expand an income-generating activity, and thereby escape from poverty.

Download English (PDF, 4 pages, 150 KB)
Author Milford Bateman
Series ODI Background Notes
Publisher Overseas Development Institute (ODI)
Copyright © 2011 Overseas Development Institute (ODI)
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