5/24/2010
Miami Herald
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http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/24/1642100/new-website-lets-people-he...
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Taking a cue from other popular microlending sites that connect people directly to business owners looking for a capital, a new website is hoping to connect the Haitian diaspora directly to business people in Haiti who want financial help.
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Zafen is a partnership between Fonkoze, Haiti's largest microfinance organization, and DePaul University, which wanted to create the site as part of its 350th anniversary of the death of St. Vincent de Paul. ``I think what Zafen is trying to do is recognize the true value and partnership with access to capital,'' said DePaul University's Laura Hartman, a business ethics professor who is the liaison between the university and Fonkoze on the project. The site contains several dozen projects asking for either donations or contributions, like Kiskeya Aqua Ferme, a fish farm in Leogane, the epicenter of the Jan. 12 earthquake. Kiskeya is requesting a loan of $2,200 to buy supplies that will enhance its tilapia production to up to 100,000 pounds this year.
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People can contribute amounts as small as $25 directly on the site, where payments are processed through PayPal. Similar to popular lending sites like Kiva.org, the interest-free loans' progress can be tracked. The site was in process long before the earthquake as a response to the many requests Fonkoze was hearing from Haitian-Americans about how theyccould directly get involved in helping small-business owners in Haiti.
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Since the site was launched last month, it has already received about 200 contributions worth $50,000. And organizers have found that especially because of the earthquake, many people across the world have started contributing. ``Remittances are unsuccessful if there is no decent economy to run their business,'' Hartman said. ``Haitians in the diaspora were clamoring for a way to support entrepreneurs, small and medium-sized
businesses, in a way that was reliable.''

Miami Herald
BY NIALA BOODHOO
nboodhoo@MiamiHerald.com
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CABARET, Haiti -- Ask Clanise Paul how to spell her name, and the talkative 27 year-old pauses for a moment before explaining she can't read or write. But ask her how she operates her business, and she doesn't hesitate to explain the intricate details of how before the January earthquake, she made a hefty profit by selling juice and other food on the side of the road. Paul is also like many who lost everything in the earthquake -- not just her house, but also her merchandise.
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But unlike many merchants, Paul has help. Because she had borrowed money from microfinance organization Fonkoze, not only will her initial loan be forgiven, but she is also receiving a small cash infusion to help in the short-term. Small merchants like Paul, called ti machann, make up the backbone of an economy where 80 percent of commerce comes from self-employment. Recapitalization of these people, especially in rural areas where formal banking opportunities are limited, is a critical part of rebuilding Haiti's economy, said Leonie Hermantin, the Miami-based deputy director of The Lambi Fund, a nonprofit that focuses on economic justice in Haiti.
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``We have the newcomers who also need to have a source of income, the farmers, the merchants who now really have to find a way to make money, because they have in some households, 10 more mouths to feed,'' said Hermantin, referring to the many who fled Port-au-Prince to the countryside following the Jan. 12 earthquake. It's been four years since Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize for three decades of work fighting poverty through microcredit. When the Nobel Committee hailed their efforts to ``to create economic and social development from below,'' it also thrust a global spotlight on microlending, which focuses on tiny loans, anywhere from $50 to several thousands dollars, mostly to the poor in rural areas.
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Organizations like Fonkoze, founded in 1994, follow similar principles of microlending in Haiti: loans, which range from $25 to as high as $25,000, come with literacy and financial training. Much of its lending is to groups, not individuals, and mostly to rural women. But commercial banking institutions in Haiti, including the country's largest banks, also have for-profit microfinance arms that function in a similar fashion to traditional larger loans.
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Industry experts say they see the earthquake is as an opportunity for all types of microfinance institutions to expand throughout the country. They estimate that just 10 percent of the available pool of loan clients are being reached right now. But first, the banking institutions themselves also have to be strengthened, as they struggle to recover loan portfolios facing unprecedented damage because of not just lost property, but even clients who may have died.
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Fonkoze is the largest microfinance organization in Haiti, as measured by the number of its clients, who are spread primarily outside of Port-au-Prince in the countryside. Like the Grameen Bank, nonprofit Fonkoze describes itself as the bank of Haiti's poor: It has 200,000 saving accounts as well as 45,000 loans, and has just also help launch a new pilot website, Zafèn, which it hopes will connect especially the Haitian Diaspora directly to business owners in Haiti who are looking for loans.
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``We believe there is a staircase out of poverty,'' said director Anne Hastings, inside Fonkoze's new temporary headquarters in Port-au-Prince. The bank's permanent headquarters were destroyed by the earthquake, along with several other branches, including at the earthquake's epicenter in Leogande, where Fonkoze brought in a mobile unit to provide banking.
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One of the main walls inside the branch at Cabaret, just outside of Port-au-Prince, has a huge crack. Workers strung up tarps and took their laptops outside where clients like Paul are being served.
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``I started working with Fonkoze to get a little bit of money,'' said Paul, as she stood outside near one of the tarps. Paul was describing the bank's first-tier loan program, which they call Ti Kredi, or little credit, loans as small as $25. She eventually moved into the second tier, forming a group with other women who manage a $1,000 loan together. Those groups meet regularly for literacy and business training. Since the earthquake Fonkoze has focused, as Hastings said, on getting its clients back on the staircase.
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For years Fonkoze has partnered with Haiti's Alternative Insurance Company to also offer microinsurance in each loan, so if that the loan holder dies, not only is the loan forgiven, but the family is given a small indemnity to help with funeral costs. The two were about to introduce a catastrophic microinsurance program just before the earthquake. They decided they would treat all of Fonkoze's loan clients as if they were enrolled in the program, resulting in 17,000 loan clients affected by the earthquake having their loans forgiven. Clients also received a 5,000 gourde ($128) indemnity.
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``I think insurance is there to improve the quality of lives of individuals,'' said AIC President Olivier Barrau, who started the microinsurance program with Fonkoze in 2007, and said it is designed to help educate all Haitians, who are chronically underinsured, about how insurance should be not just a financial, but social tool. Hastings said the insurance, literacy and financial tools are all part of their goal of lifting people out of poverty.
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``We're really trying as hard as we can to educate clients that if you stay in Haiti, you need to have insurance because everything you have can be wiped out overnight,'' said Hastings. Six weeks after the earthquake, Septus Rodrigue was one of the first in line at the Sogesol bank in Pétionville, Haiti, the first week the bank was open to talk to microlending clients about refinancing their loans. Rodrigue, a barber who owns his own shop a few miles from the Sogesol Pétionville office, has gone through several microloans, not just with Sogesol, but with institutions as well.
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His shop didn't sustain much physical damage from the earthquake, but he worries that many of his clients have died, so he came in to talk to a loan officer about what he owes. Rodrigue is one of 13,000 Sogesol clients who have loans ranging from $50 to $20,000. In all, Sogesol's loan portfolio is about $12.5 million, the biggest of any microloan portfolio in Haiti. Sogesol is the microfinance affiliate of Haiti's largest and oldest locally-owned bank, Sogebank. Like Fonkoze, immediately after the earthquake, Pierre Marie Boisson, Sogesol's chairman, swung into action, issuing a recovery document they shared with partners.
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``It said two things,'' said Boisson, who based the document on past experience of loan recovery in previous disasters like last year's floods in Gonaives. ``We estimate we will have some of our clients die, or leave Port-au-Prince. But we'll have a significant portion of clientele that will remain but be traumatized. We need to refinance those guys quickly.'' Sogesol has since managed to refinance 90 percent of their clients who were affected by the earthquake. Two Sogesol employees died in the earthquake, but Boisson said the organization has been amazed that it seems just a small percentage of their loan clients have died.
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Boisson, who is on Haiti's Central Bank Board of Governors, has helped the central bank come up with a guarantee fund, which will be funded by the Inter-American Development Bank, that will take on some of the risk to credit extended by banks after the earthquake. The IDB has also been working to establish a mechanism similar to what the United States did to take over the troubled assets U.S. banks were holding in subprime loans.
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Like many Haitian institutions, microfinance organizations before the earthquake were in a good place -- stabilized, and many growing, said Fernando Campero, a senior financial specialist with FOMIN, a multilateral investment fund, grant and loan facility and the part of the IDB which deals with microfinance institutions. ``They provided an important role, I think, because the banking sector was much more concentrated on the higher sector of the economy, more corporate lending,'' Campero said. But the earthquake in Haiti is unprecedented for the size and scope of the damage to microfinance loan portfolios across the country, Campero said. ``This is far beyond anything we have seen,'' said Campero. ``In other crises, you see institutions affected because they are located in just a region.''
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Five years ago, FOMIN helped start an Emergency Liquidity Facility that helps prequalified microfinance institutions in developing countries deal with external shocks such as natural disasters or political crises. Most recently, the facility had been helping with the global financial crisis.
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The facility has since decided to start an emergency liquidity fund solely for Haitian microfinance institutions they're calling HELP: the Haiti Emergency Liquidity Program. The $7 million to $8 million fund, being created right now, plans to buy the parts of Haitian microloan portfolios that are likely to be delinquent because of the earthquake, and spend three years working with clients to try to collect on the loans.
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That way the Haitian institutions can concentrate on growing their base, said Juan Carlos Perreira, whose Costa Rican-based company, Omtrix, manages the emergency liquidity facility. ``You have a very large potential for microfinance in Haiti,'' said Perreira, who will also manage HELP. ``But the first thing we have to do is make sure these institutions continue operating -- to clean that balance sheet, and provide funding so they can continue with clients. That's what will really make a difference with those people out here who have lost everything.''

5/5/2010
Citibank
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Today Citi announced it will provide $1 million in charitable contributions to three local microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Haiti to help restore the country's microfinance industry which has suffered severe challenges in the aftermath of the earthquake earlier this year. The funds, which will be granted to Fonkoze, FINCA Haiti and SOGESOL, will help drive job creation, support livelihood preservation and contribute to the long-term economic development of the country.
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Specifically, the grants will help alleviate the MFIs' client losses while allowing the organizations to increase and extend their outreach to local micro entrepreneurs and small business owners most affected by the earthquake. Today's announcement is part of the pledge Citi made to provide $2 million in charitable contributions to the relief and reconstruction efforts in Haiti. In addition and immediately following the earthquake, Citi, in partnership with the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF), approved a shipment of pre-packaged relief supplies and launched a fundraising campaign to encourage donations from employees and clients across the world.
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Citi anticipates that the charitable contributions will impact at least 13,000 Haitians entrepreneurs and their families who are rebuilding their lives post-earthquake. "Our commitment to the people of Haiti is stronger than ever. We have operated locally in the country since 1971, connecting individuals and organizations to products and services to meet their business and financial goals," said Citi CEO Vikram Pandit. "We are proud to support leading local microfinance organizations, such as FINCA, Sogesol and Fonkoze, to help contribute to Haiti's economic recovery and empower those most in need. This grant reflects our work with microfinance institutions in 60 countries around the world to support small business, drive job creation and empower individuals to become economically self-sufficient."
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"Enabling Haitians to get small businesses up and running again and restoring people's jobs are among our most critical challenges moving forward," said Ronald Baudin, Finance Minister of Haiti. "Citi's support to strengthen our microfinance infrastructure, thereby jumpstarting local business and creating jobs, will be a welcome boost to the economy."
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"Over 200,000 families and small businesses in Haiti depend on MFIs for funding," said Gladys M. Coupet, Director, Country Corporate Officer, Citi Haiti. "Our local team understands first-hand the key role played by the MFIs and appreciates the opportunity to support micro-enterprises that are so critical to job creation, which remains the top priority for Haiti. We also believe this recovery process is an opportunity to help Haiti develop and expand the existing capabilities of its financial system over the long term."
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Citi has been a part of the fabric of the community in Haiti since 1971. Citi Foundation has granted nearly $300,000 to local microfinance and microenterprise programs over the past 10 years. Additionally, in March, 2010, Citi's Banamex joined the Inter-American Development Bank, OPIC and other partners to launch the Microfinance Growth Fund, a new lending facility that will provide up to $250 million in funding to microfinance intuitions in Latin America and the Caribbean.
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About Citi: Citi, the leading global financial services company, has approximately 200 million customer accounts and does business in more than 140 countries. Through Citicorp and Citi Holdings, Citi provides consumers, corporations, governments and institutions with a broad range of financial products and services, including consumer banking and credit, corporate and investment banking, securities brokerage, transaction services, and wealth management. Additional information may be found at www.Citigroup.com or www.Citi.com.
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About Fonkoze: Fonkoze is Haiti's largest microfinance organization with a mission to build the economic foundation for democracy in Haiti by providing the rural poor -- mostly women -- with the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty. Fonkoze is national in scope with more than 40 branches throughout Haiti offering a full range of financial services to the rural-based poor, currently reaching more than 225,000 savers and borrowers. To learn more about Fonkoze, visit www.fonkoze.org.
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About FINCA HAITI: FINCA Haiti has been in operation since 1989, serving the entrepreneurial poor with financial services to help them create jobs, build assets and improve their quality of life. Headquartered in Port au Prince, FINCA Haiti has provincial operations in Hinche, Saint Marc, Limbe, Miragoane, Les Cayes, Aquin, Petit Goave, Jacmel, Cap Haitien, Ouanaminthe and Leogane, making it uniquely positioned to serve the Haitian people -- especially women - living in the urban center and throughout the rural areas.
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About SOGESOL: SOGESOL's mission is to promote Haitian micro-entrepreneurship by adapting traditional banking to the needs of micro-entrepreneurs, while maintaining standards of profitability and efficiency. The institution offers a wide range of products including loans to micro and small entrepreneurs in the informal sector, fast cash financing for the lowest income entrepreneurs, loans to factory and private sector employees, loans for business infrastructure and home improvement, loans for the acquisition of goods for trade and for personal consumption, and financing commercial Digicel cellular phone purchases. SOGESOL is owned at 50% by the Group SOGEBANK in partnership with ACCION. It has 18 branches serving over 12,000 clients.
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Photos/Multimedia Gallery Available: http://www.businesswire.com/cgi-bin/mmg.cgi?eid=6277839&lang=en

By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
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In Mexico City, Maria Vargas has borrowed larger and larger amounts from Compartamos, a Mexican firm, over the past two decades to expand her T-shirt factory to 25 sewing machines from 5. 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. The idea even got its very own United Nations year in 2005.
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But the phenomenon has grown so popular that some of its biggest proponents are now wringing their hands over the direction it has taken. Drawn by the prospect of hefty profits from even the smallest of loans, a raft of banks and financial institutions now dominate the field, with some charging interest rates of 100 percent or more.
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“We created microcredit to fight the loan sharks; we didn’t create microcredit to encourage new loan sharks,” Mr. Yunus recently said at a gathering of financial officials at the United Nations. “Microcredit should be seen as an opportunity to help people get out of poverty in a business way, but not as an opportunity to make money out of poor people.”
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The fracas over preserving the field’s saintly aura centers on the question of how much interest and profit is acceptable, and what constitutes exploitation. The noisy interest rate fight has even attracted Congressional scrutiny, with the House Financial Services Committee holding hearings this year focused in part on whether some microcredit institutions are scamming the poor.
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Rates vary widely across the globe, but the ones that draw the most concern tend to occur in countries like Nigeria and Mexico, where the demand for small loans from a large population cannot be met by existing lenders. Unlike virtually every Web page trumpeting the accomplishments of microcredit institutions around the world, the page for Te Creemos, a Mexican lender, lacks even one testimonial from a thriving customer — no beaming woman earning her first income by growing a soap business out of her kitchen, for example. Te Creemos has some of the highest interest rates and fees in the world of microfinance, analysts say, a whopping 125 percent average annual rate.
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The average in Mexico itself is around 70 percent, compared with a global average of about 37 percent in interest and fees, analysts say. Mexican microfinance institutions charge such high rates simply because they can get away with it, said Emmanuelle Javoy, the managing director of Planet Rating, an independent Paris-based firm that evaluates microlenders.
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“They could do better; they could do a lot better,” she said. “If the ones that are very big and have the margins don’t set the pace, then the rest of the market follows.” Manuel Ramírez, director of risk and internal control at Te Creemos, reached by telephone in Mexico City, initially said there had been some unspecified “misunderstanding” about the numbers and asked for more time to clarify, but then stopped responding.
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Unwitting individuals, who can make loans of $20 or more through Web sites like Kiva or Microplace, may also end up participating in practices some consider exploitative. These Web sites admit that they cannot guarantee every interest rate they quote. Indeed, the real rate can prove to be markedly higher.
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Underlying the issue is a fierce debate over whether microloans actually lift people out of poverty, as their promoters so often claim. The recent conclusion of some researchers is that not every poor person is an entrepreneur waiting to be discovered, but that the loans do help cushion some of the worst blows of poverty.
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“The lesson is simply that it didn’t save the world,” Dean S. Karlan, a professor of economics at Yale University, said about microlending. “It is not the single transformative tool that proponents have been selling it as, but there are positive benefits.” Still, its earliest proponents do not want its reputation tarnished by new investors seeking profits on the backs of the poor, though they recognize that the days of just earning enough to cover costs are over.
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“They call it ‘social investing,’ but nobody has a definition for social investing, nobody is saying, for example, that you have to make less than 10 percent profit,” said Chuck Waterfield, who runs mftransparency.org, a Web site that promotes transparency and is financed by big microfinance investors. Making pots of money from microfinance is certainly not illegal. CARE, the Atlanta-based humanitarian organization, was the force behind a microfinance institution it started in Peru in 1997. The initial investment was around $3.5 million, including $450,000 of taxpayer money. But last fall, Banco de Credito, one of Peru’s largest banks, bought the business for $96 million, of which CARE pocketed $74 million.
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“Here was a sale that was good for Peru, that was good for our broad social mission and advertising the price of the sale wasn’t the point of the announcement,” Helene Gayle, CARE’s president, said. Ms. Gayle described the new owners as committed to the same social mission of alleviating poverty and said CARE expected to use the money to extend its own reach in other countries. The microfinance industry, with over $60 billion in assets, has unquestionably outgrown its charitable roots. Elisabeth Rhyne, who runs the Center for Financial Inclusion, said in Congressional testimony this year that banks and finance firms served 60 percent of all clients. Nongovernmental organizations served 35 percent of the clients, she said, while credit unions and rural banks had 5 percent of the clients.
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Private capital first began entering the microfinance arena about a decade ago, but it was not until Compartamos, a Mexican firm that began life as a tiny nonprofit organization, generated $458 million through a public stock sale in 2007, that investors fully recognized the potential for a windfall, experts said. Although the Compartamos founders pledged to plow the money back into development, analysts say the high interest rates and healthy profits of Compartamos, the largest microfinance institution in the Western Hemisphere with 1.2 million active borrowers, push up interest rates all across Mexico.
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According to the Microfinance Information Exchange, a Web site known as the Mix, where more than 1,000 microfinance companies worldwide report their own numbers, Compartamos charges an average of nearly 82 percent in interest and fees. The site’s global data comes from 2008. But poor borrowers are often too inexperienced and too harried to understand what they are being charged, experts said. In Mexico City, Maria Vargas has borrowed larger and larger amounts from Compartamos over 20 years to expand her T-shirt factory to 25 sewing machines from 5. She is hazy about what interest rate she actually pays, though she considers it high.
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“The interest rate is important, but to be honest, you can get so caught up in work that there is no time to go fill out paperwork in another place,” she said. After several loans, now a simple phone call to Compartamos gets her a check the next day, she said. Occasionally, interest rates spur political intervention. In Nicaragua, President Daniel Ortega, outraged that interest rates there were hovering around 35 percent in 2008, announced that he would back a microfinance institution that would charge 8 to 10 percent, using Venezuelan money.
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There were scattered episodes of setting aflame microfinance branches before a national “We’re not paying” campaign erupted, which was widely believed to be mounted secretly by the Sandinista government. After the courts stopped forcing small borrowers to repay, making international financial institutions hesitant to work with Nicaragua, the campaign evaporated.
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The microfinance industry is pushing for greater transparency among its members, but says that most microlenders are honest, with experts putting the number of dubious institutions anywhere from less than 1 percent to more than 10 percent. Given that competition has a pattern of lowering interest rates worldwide, the industry prefers that approach to government intervention. Part of the problem, however, is that all kinds of institutions making loans plaster them with the “microfinance” label because of its do-good reputation.
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Damian von Stauffenberg, who founded an independent rating agency called Microrate, said that local conditions had to be taken into account, but that any firm charging 20 to 30 percent above the market was “unconscionable” and that profit rates above 30 percent should be considered high.
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Mr. Yunus says interest rates should be 10 to 15 percent above the cost of raising the money, with anything beyond a “red zone” of loan sharking. “We need to draw a line between genuine and abuse,” he said. “You will never see the situation of poor people if you look at it through the glasses of profit-making.” Yet by that measure, 75 percent of microfinance institutions would fall into Mr. Yunus’s “red zone,” according to a March analysis of 1,008 microlenders by Adrian Gonzalez, lead researcher at the Mix. His study found that much of the money from interest rates was used to cover operating expenses, and argued that tackling costs, as opposed to profits, could prove the most efficient way to lower interest rates.
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Many experts label Mr. Yunus’s formula overly simplistic and too low, a route to certain bankruptcy in countries with high operating expenses. Costs of doing business in Asia and the sheer size of the Grameen Bank he founded in Bangladesh allow for economies of scale that keep costs down, analysts say. “Globally interest rates have been going down as a general trend,” said Ms. Javoy of Planet Rating.
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Many companies say the highest rates reflect the costs of reaching the poorest, most inaccessible borrowers. It costs more to handle 10 loans of $100 than one loan of $1,000. Some analysts fear that a pronounced backlash against high interest rates will prompt lenders to retreat from the poorest customers. But experts also acknowledge that banks and others who dominate the industry are slow to address problems.
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Like Mexico, Nigeria attracts scrutiny for high interest rates. One firm, LAPO, Lift Above Poverty Organization, has raised questions, particularly since it was backed by prominent investors like Deutsche Bank and the Calvert Foundation. LAPO, considered the leading microfinance institution in Nigeria, engages in a contentious industry practice sometimes referred to as “forced savings.” Under it, the lender keeps a portion of the loan. Proponents argue that it helps the poor learn to save, while critics call it exploitation since borrowers do not get the entire amount up front but pay interest on the full loan.
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LAPO collected these so-called savings from its borrowers without a legal permit to do so, according to a Planet Rating report. “It was known to everybody that they did not have the right license,” Ms. Javoy said. Under outside pressure, LAPO announced in 2009 that it was decreasing its monthly interest rate, Planet Rating noted, but at the same time compulsory savings were quietly raised to 20 percent of the loan from 10 percent. So, the effective interest rate for some clients actually leapt to nearly 126 percent annually from 114 percent, the report said. The average for all LAPO clients was nearly 74 percent in interest and fees, the report found.
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Anita Edward says she has borrowed money three times from LAPO for her hair salon, Amazing Collections, in Benin City, Nigeria. The money comes cheaper than other microloans, and commercial banks are virtually impossible, she said, but she resents the fact that LAPO demanded that she keep $100 of her roughly $666 10-month loan in a savings account while she paid interest on the full amount. “That is not O.K. by me,” she said. “It is not fair. They should give you the full money.”
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The loans from LAPO helped her expand from one shop to two, but when she started she thought she would have more money to put into the business. “It has improved my life, but not changed it,” said Ms. Edward, 30. Godwin Ehigiamusoe, LAPO’s founding executive director, defended his company’s high interest rates, saying they reflected the high cost of doing business in Nigeria. For example, he said, each of the company’s more than 200 branches needed its own generator and fuel to run it.
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Until recently, Microplace, which is part of eBay, was promoting LAPO to individual investors, even though the Web site says the lenders it features have interest rates between 18 and 60 percent, considerably less than what LAPO customers typically pay. As recently as February, Microplace also said that LAPO had a strong rating from Microrate, yet the rating agency had suspended LAPO the previous August, six months earlier. Microplace then removed the rating after The New York Times called to inquire why it was still being used and has since taken LAPO investments off the Web site.
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At Kiva, which promises on its Web site that it “will not partner with an organization that charges exorbitant interest rates,” the interest rate and fees for LAPO was recently advertised as 57 percent, the average rate from 2007. After The Times called to inquire, Kiva changed it to 83 percent.
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Premal Shah, Kiva’s president, said it was a question of outdated information rather than deception. “I would argue that the information is stale as opposed to misleading,” he said. “It could have been a tad better.” While analysts characterize such microfinance Web sites as well-meaning, they question whether the sites sufficiently vetted the organizations they promoted.
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Questions had already been raised about Kiva because the Web site once promised that loans would go to specific borrowers identified on the site, but later backtracked, clarifying that the money went to organizations rather than individuals. Promotion aside, the overriding question facing the industry, analysts say, remains how much money investors should make from lending to poor people, mostly women, often at interest rates that are hidden.
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“You can make money from the poorest people in the world — is that a bad thing, or is that just a business?” asked Mr. Waterfield of mftransparency.org. “At what point do we say we have gone too far?”