Microcredit and International Development: Contexts, Achievements and Challenges

By means of evaluating the opportunities and challenges of microcredit, the book provides key lessons about microcredit for international development purposes. More specifically, the authors of the chapters offer a series of insights into microcredit activities as they relate to the real world. For example, in his chapter, David Hulme traces the developing nature of the activities of the highly influential Grameen Bank, that is, from activities focused on subsidised microcredit to more market-based microfinance activities. In their chapter, Johanna Hietalahti and Anja Nygren examine microcredit as a socio-political institution in South Africa and, in doing so, unearth the complex interactions between of rules, logic and power-relations which are relevant to microcredit activities. In another chapter, Asad Ghalib uses the context of Rural Punjab in Pakistan in order to assess the extent to which microcredit-related activities actually reach the poor.

Taken together, the chapters in the book provide readers with an opportunity to consider a host of factors connected to microcredit from a genuinely international perspective.