How Micro-Finance Providers Target the Poor: A Compendium of Strategies, 1998. $30.00
Mathie, Alison (ed.)
Micro-finance, by providing small loans and savings facilities to those who are excluded from commercial financial services, has been promoted as a key strategy for reducing poverty in all its forms. Although micro-finance programs are often driven by a moral imperative to alleviate poverty, the extent to which they reach the poorest with their services continues to be an issue of debate.
Under the auspices of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP) Working Group on Poverty Yardsticks and Measurement Tools, the Coady International Institute was commissioned by the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to produce a compendium of poverty targeting strategies currently in use by practitioners in the field. The purpose of the compendium is to move beyond identification and measurement of the poor to provide a resource for practitioners that would show how micro-finance service providers combine different targeting methods in their effort to have their services reach intended clients.
The compendium presents strategies from 25 institutions, illustrating the choice of targeting strategy in the context of each organization's mandate, its rationale for poverty targeting, the additional benefits associated with that strategy and the challenges to effective targeting.