Microfinance Resources

The World Affairs Council of Northern California 2008 Awards Dinner honored Professor Muhammad Yunus and celebrated the progress the microfinance industry has made in eradicating global poverty, honoring the roots it as has grown in Northern California. We recognized three local companies representative of these efforts: Kiva, MicroCredit Enterprises and MicroPlace.

Basics of MicroFinance

Articles on Current Microfinance Trends

Current Microfinance Debates

People are asking whether microfinance should be about poverty alleviation or profit generation. Can it be about both? Can microfinance serve two masters?
What is the ultimate goal of microfinance? To provide more loans? To help the poor build business? If the goal of microfinance is to alleviate poverty, microfinance institutions should focus more on helping the poor build successful enterprises, rather than focusing on making more and bigger loans.

"MicroLoan Sharks," Jonathan Lewis, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Summer 2008

"What MicroFinance can Teach Wall Street", S. Aiyar, The Times of India, October 12, 2008

In MicroFinance, Clients Must Come First," Srikant M. Datar, Marc J. Epstein, and Kristi Yunthas, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Winter 2008

"Serving the World's Poor, Profitably," C.K. Prahalad and Allen Hammond, Harvard Business Review, September 2002

Our Honorees

These three organizations represent just a sample of the creativity that Northern Californians have brought to the growing microfinance movement.

Kiva

Kiva’s mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty. Named as one of the top ideas in 2006 by the New York Times Magazine and called “revolutionary” by the BBC, Kiva is the world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website. Kiva lets internet users lend as little as $25 to specific developing world entrepreneurs, providing affordable capital to help them start or expand a small business. Kiva has been one of the fastest-growing social benefit websites in history, with hundreds of thousands of people lending millions of dollars to hard-working, poor entrepreneurs every day. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending in over 120 countries around the world.

MicroPlace

MicroPlace is a social venture owned by eBay that gives everyday Americans the opportunity to alleviate global
poverty while earning a financial return. Microfinance provides small loans to the world’s working poor so they can work their way out of poverty, with dignity. MicroPlace, a registered broker-dealer with the SEC, is the only online platform where investors can find socially responsible investments in microfinance institutions spanning the globe. For the billion people living on less than $1 per day, a loan of as little as $30 can change a life.

MicroCredit Enterprises

Established in 2005, MicroCredit Enterprises is a pioneering private sector, anti-poverty program that leverages the private capital of high net worth individuals to provide small business loans to impoverished entrepreneurs in developing countries who live on $1 per day or less. MicroCredit Enterprises is backed by a growing network of Guarantors with a current total of $37 million in pledged assets. To date, MicroCredit Enterprises has funded 95,000 microentrepreneurs across 15 countries and on four continents.