microfinance

Despite the Pradhan Mantri Jan Dhan Yojana's success in increasing bank account registrations, many Indians still don’t trust banks with their savings. How can this change?

With young India's needs being better served by the market today, nonprofits run the risk of being crowded out by social businesses.

Women comprise a very small proportion of the financial industry workforce, and this has implications on the way female clients use and benefit from financial services.

Current financial service models conflate women with ‘family’, considering them merely an avenue to pursue social welfare.

Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus talks about what it will take to create a just and more equal world, and the power of individuals to bring about this change.

The autonomy, or at least the opinion, of women in financial decisions affects the bottom line of MFIs.

Studies find that male-operated--but not female-operated--microenterprises benefit from access to grants or loans. But these analyses overlook that female entrepreneurs often invest in a household business that is not owned by them.

Financial inclusion is one of the most effective accelerators of economic participation by women; it is therefore important to design products that help women overcome barriers to access and inclusion.

This article features insights from a series of experiments in India that explored how microfinance can be refined to strengthen its beneficial impact for the world’s poorest women.

As India aims to uplift its extreme poor by 2022, evidenced based approaches need to inform government policies for large-scale solutions.