{"id":473,"date":"2011-01-22T09:17:41","date_gmt":"2011-01-22T14:17:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/?p=473"},"modified":"2011-01-22T09:17:41","modified_gmt":"2011-01-22T14:17:41","slug":"microfinance-the-conversation-so-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/473","title":{"rendered":"Microfinance: The Conversation So Far"},"content":{"rendered":"

I started the year by blogging about microfinance, discussing the institution’s woes<\/a> after coming across an article in the New York Times<\/em> that did the same. A few days later, I snarkily posted about the good news being that microfinance research was not as bad as medical research<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I am not an expert on microfinance. The last time I conducted any kind of research on the topic was for my Masters thesis<\/a> at the Universit\u00e9 de Montr\u00e9al, which I hope no one ever reads given how embarrassingly bad it was. My knowledge of the institution comes from reading working papers and journal articles on the topic, a module on which I teach each fall in my development seminar.<\/p>\n

Consequently, a friend of my wife’s and mine who has been working in the microfinance industry for a while now took me to task and wrote a lengthy reply on Facebook to my initial posts. Given how insightful his detailed response was, I asked him if I could blog it, and he agreed under the condition that he remained anonymous. The five most important points he made in his response follow.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. The Opposition is Politically Driven<\/a><\/li>\n
  2. The Evaluation Timeframe Matters<\/a>,<\/li>\n
  3. The Poor Deserve Financial Services<\/a><\/li>\n
  4. Governments Need to Regulate the Industry<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. Microfinance is Here to Stay<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    These five posts represent my very modest contribution — with the help of a friend — to the policy discussion surrounding microfinance. If you have an interest in the topic, I strongly encourage you to follow senior Center for Global Development<\/a> senior fellow David Roodman’s blog<\/a>, in which he shares his insights while writing a book on the impacts of microfinance. I have a feeling his book will be required reading in my development seminar when it comes out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I started the year by blogging about microfinance, discussing the institution’s woes after coming across an article in the New York Times that did the…<\/p>\n

    Continue readingMicrofinance: The Conversation So Far<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[27],"class_list":["post-473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-development","tag-microfinance","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1gPg8-7D","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=473"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":479,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/473\/revisions\/479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcfbellemare.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}