Microfinance Horizon

By Holden

5 November 2010 [GiveWell]

GiveWell attended the Microfinance Innovation & Impact Conference via Board member Tim Ogden and part-time employee Stephanie Wykstra. (Our full-time staff could not attend as we are all in India). Our main takeaways:

• The people involved with this conference, and the nonprofits working with them, are producing a lot of promising, interesting, rigorous and informative work on how microfinance affects the poor and how these effects might be improved.

• While microlending is the form of microfinance that has been most funded, celebrated and scaled up over the decades, it appears to be the least proven and least-well understood in terms of its impact on the poor. In many ways it seems that good information on how (and to what extent) it’s helpful is just starting to become available.

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