The Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX), a nonprofit organization founded in 2002 with headquarters in Washington, DC, has informed MicroCapital that it will be adding the MIX Funding Structure Data set to the MIX Market website in July 2010.
For fiscal year 2008, MIX has collected information on roughly 8,000 transactions from 800 MFIs. MIX anticipates public access to this database will increase microfinance transparency and enable a new level of analysis of funding flows to MFIs.
Banks that ignore the huge numbers of people who remain outside the financial system may be missing an opportunity to improve their image and increase their profits.
Financial exclusion is seen as a purely developing world problem. It is not. In some developing countries, almost three-quarters of the population are unbanked and access to financial services is confined to the urban middle classes. But the number of people in mature economies who remain outside of the financial system is also shocking.
Analistas del MIX toman tiempo para hablar con el Portal de Microfinanzas sobre sus trabajos y por qué estos son importantes para el sector de microfinanzas de Latinoamérica.
Entrevista realizada al equipo de MIX para América Latina conformado por Jessica Elisberg, Renso Martínez, María Cecilia Rondón y Arturo Valencia.
In recent years, the idea of giving small loans to poor people became the darling of the development world, hailed as the long elusive formula to propel even the most destitute into better lives.
Actors like Natalie Portman and Michael Douglas lent their boldface names to the cause. Muhammad Yunus, the economist who pioneered the practice by lending small amounts to basket weavers in Bangladesh, won a Nobel Peace Prize for it in 2006.
Almost 40 years since he began his love affair with micro credit Prof Muhammad Yunus says regulation is crucial to growth. As a number of countries move to consolidate their microfinance institutions (MFIs), tight but favourable rules are needed to spur growth.
“Regulation is still a thorny issue,” he says, “Others have it, some don’t but they all operate.
ITIS hard for people in the rich world to imagine what it is like to live on $2 a day. But for those who do, the problem is often not just a low income, but an unpredictable one. Living on $2 a day frequently means living for ten days on $20 earned on a single day. The task of smoothing consumption is made more complicated if there is nowhere to store money safely. In an emergency, richer people might choose between dipping into their savings and borrowing.
Companies that provide banking services in developing countries are attracting private investment. But is the industry losing sight of its mission to alleviate poverty?
The Microfinance Information Exchange, Inc. has announced that the microfinance taxonomy it developed has been officially acknowledged by XBRL International, the coordinating body for all XBRL activities and standards.
“There is nothing that has been more important to me over the course of my lifetime than advancing the rights of women and girls,” said Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in a Washington speech Nov. 6. “And it is now a cornerstone of American foreign policy.”
A new focus inside the State Department is financial inclusion: ensuring that women have access to savings accounts, health insurance, home ownership and business funding.
