The phrase “Customer is King” may be an oversimplified cliché in business, but – stripped of all its bells and whistles – this phrase represents the essence of a consumer business.
A business’s survival depends on serving and meeting customer needs and demands. Businesses have to focus on their customers, their needs, their behaviors, and a multitude of other factors that impact their lives. A successful, thriving business can no longer be an isolated business; it must adapt to customers and the marketplace. Increasingly, businesses from differing sectors— from technology to entertainment to retail and even to banking—are partnering with each other to cater to the same customer base or extend their own client access. Today, people can access banking products and services practically anywhere – post offices, online, and through mobile devices. In addition, financial service providers offer financial education, consumer awareness, and even training and seminars on managing personal finances as well as small businesses. Based on this same concept, we believe that microfinance can better serve its clients by extending services to meet their life demands.
Over the years, microfinance has demonstrated that its impact goes beyond providing individuals with access to capital; it has also helped to protect, diversify and increase their sources of income and assets that enable them to make their way out of poverty. It has shown that when we provide capital to poor individuals with entrepreneurial ideas and spirit, they will utilize that capital to generate income for themselves and their families – offering them the potential of a life that is poverty free. To date, microfinance has touched the lives and communities of more than 100 million families, and has helped lift many of them out of poverty or at least put them on a pathway to a poverty-free life. However, more than three billion people still live on less than two dollars a day; more than a billion have no access to electricity; and three billion have no access to safe sanitation. For these individuals, microfinance is a tool that must continue to be deployed and leveraged to its maximum potential.
Access to capital has provided people with the opportunity to climb the economic ladder.
Nonetheless, we have witnessed that simple access to capital, while paramount, is often not enough to realize the kind of rapid poverty reduction that is needed to reach the Millennium Development Goals. For some, capital is the missing element in their struggles against poverty.
For others, capital is overshadowed by non-financial factors that also contribute to poverty.
Therefore, to create solutions that address poverty and to enhance the existing use of microfinance, we need to understand that poverty is a result of a multitude of factors that encompass more than merely a limited income. According to the Chronic Poverty Research Centre, “chronic poverty is typically characterized not only by low income and assets, but also by hunger and malnutrition, illiteracy, the lack of access to basic necessities such as safe drinking water and health services, and social isolation and exploitation.”2 Because poverty encompasses more than just finance, microfinance—a purpose-driven business—needs to look beyond just offering credit or banking services to the poor. To properly serve clients’ needs and fulfill its purpose, microfinance needs to do more to address the underlying factors of poverty than simply providing access to capital. This paper argues that although microfinance is an effective poverty alleviation tool, it should be utilized as a platform for multiple empowerment approaches, building on the successful models being pioneered by a few microfinance practitioners. In other words, microfinance should leverage its position in the field and relationships with clients to deliver other social and development services. By integrating different approaches and models to deliver a variety of basic poverty alleviation services to the poor, these individuals will have a greater chance of lifting themselves out of poverty, and, more importantly, staying out of poverty.
Microfinance: A Platform for Social Change by Marge Magner March 2007 Grameen Foundation
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Grameen Foundation
(Visit Grameen's Website)
Grameen Foundation's mission is to empower
the world's poorest people to lift
themselves out of poverty with dignity
through access to financial services and
to information.
With tiny loans, financial services and
technology, we help the poor, mostly
women, start self-sustaining businesses to
escape poverty. Founded in 1997 by a group
of friends who were inspired by the work
of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, our global
network of microfinance partners reaches
over 3.6 million families in 25 countries.
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