An important World Bank research paper just out this week by Robert Cull and Jonathan Morduch very centrally concedes that microfinance has had no positive impact on poverty or local economic development. Of course, Cull and Morduch must locate at least some residual usefulness for the microfinance model, but they only thing they could come up with is the mere fact that it can ease household liquidity constraints for the global poor, which is hardly earth-shattering and in raising this issue they have had to avert there eyes from any discussion of the fact that ‘easing liquidity constraints’ has led on to serious over indebtedness in many countries . Moreover, as a World Bank output, the authors are naturally prohibited from entering into any discussion of the enormous value being appropriated by the big mainly US-based financial and digital institutions at the expense of the global poor, which means the ‘reality’ they purport to describe in the paper is far removed from what is actually happening in the field. But the paper is nevertheless an important step taken by long-time advocates of microfinance to recognise and take stock of past mistakes. Hopefully, it will offer further help in allowing the development community the opportunity to move on to supporting far more developmental forms of local finance from now on.
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/107171511360386561/pdf/WPS8252.pdf
