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Conclusion - Microfinance: A Platform for Social Change

We firmly believe that an integrated approach to servicing clients can enhance microfinance’s effectiveness as a poverty alleviation tool.

Partnership Models

The examples cited are just some of the models where microfinance can be used as a platform to offer and deliver integrated services to clients. Like any business model, there is no single right way to offer services.2

MFI’s: A Critical Partner in Disaster Mitigation and Relief

Natural disasters are indiscriminate in their impact, but for poor communities – many of which are home to microfinance clients – the effects can be devastating.

Fonkoze - Educating Individuals to Become Self Sustaining

Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest microfinance institution, is another good example of integrating microfinance with other services such as medical treatment, remittances, empowerment, insurance against risk and natural disasters, health insurance, and in particular, education to help improve clients’ situations and contribute to the overall economy.

Pro Mujer - Providing Clients with Essential Health Care

Pro Mujer, an international microfinance network composed of partner MFIs in several Latin American countries, is a believer and a practitioner of “Microfinance Plus”— a term that has come to capture the concept of offering integrated services to its clients.

Enhancing Microfinance Efficacy through Integrated Services

Most microfinance organizations serve what we define as the extreme and the moderate poor.

BRAC - Linking Food and Training with Microfinance

BRAC, the world’s largest NGO with a large microfinance program serving more than five million Bangladeshi families, is another example demonstrating that microfinance can and should serve the world’s poorest.

Grameen Bank - Alternative Microfinance Approaches

Grameen Bank operates on the premise that the poor remain poor not because they do not have the skills or do not work hard, but because the institutions created around them keep them poor.

Increasing Microfinance’s Reach with Integrated Services

The destitute—individuals at the very bottom of the socioeconomic scale—are still outside the current scope of most microfinance institutions.

Improving Microfinance as an Anti-Poverty Tool

As Father Joseph Philippe, the co-founder of the Haitian MFI Fonkoze, states: “You can’t just give a woman a loan and then send her on her way - you have to accompany her as she struggles to make her way out of poverty.”

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About the Author: Grameen Foundation

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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.
Click here to visit Grameen's website.

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