The purpose of the 'Microfinance Handbook' is to bring together in a single source guiding principles and tools that will promote sustainable microfinance and create viable institutions.

Beyond Micro-Credit sets out how Indian Micro-Finance Initiatives are combining micro-finance with a wide range of development goals, these include not only poverty alleviation through providing savings, credit and insurance services but also promoting livelihoods, empowering women, building people's organizations and changing institutions.

Contributed articles on microfinance and small business in India.

Africa is home to some of the poorest and vulnerable populations in the world. The ten poorest countries in the world are in Africa. Sub-Saharan Africa is the region with the highest incidence and greatest depth of poverty in the world. Fewer than one in five adults in Africa has access to the services of a formal or semi-formal financial institution. Microfinance in Africa is growing, though. A broad range of diverse institutions offer financial services to the poor and low-income clients in Africa. These include non-governmental organizations, non-banking financial institutions, cooperatives, credit unions, rural banks, Rotating Savings and Credit Associations (ROSCAs), postal financial institutions and an increasing number of commercial banks. Increasingly, technology is being used to expand microfinance outreach mobile phone banking is one such example. This book provides an overview of the microfinance sector in Africa, reviews the performance and impact of microfinance institutions in the region, and outlines some of the opportunities and challenges that African microfinance has on hand.

This book explores for the first time the world of micro-finance, Chinese startups, and the digitalization of the Chinese economy. Through the cases such as the Ant Financial Services Group, CFPA Microfinance, micro-financial projects of China Minsheng Bank, Meixing in Nanchong, and more, this book introduces the practical exploration in the recent years from the perspectives of microfinance, financing of small and medium sized enterprises, digital inclusive finance, and credit. From the perspective of management, it especially integrates an enterprise’s task, vision, and value into the design of organization process, deeply explores how to realized the double bottom lines of social and financial performances, manifests how microfinance’s marginal cost is reduced by digital finance such as data, internet, cloud computing, artificial intelligence and the advantages of digital finance in providing convenient, low-cost, and touchable service, and discusses its huge technological bonus to small-amount, decentralized, and large-quantity microfinance. This book will be of value to journalists, economists and researchers.

A major source of financing for the poor and no longer a niche industry Over the past four decades, microfinance—the provision of loans, savings, and insurance to small businesses and entrepreneurs shut out of traditional capital markets—has grown from a niche service in Bangladesh and a few other countries to a significant global source of financing. Some 200 million people globally now receive support from microfinance institutions, with most of the recipients in the developing world. In the beginning, much of the microfinance industry was managed by non-governmental organizations, but today the majority of these institutions are commercial and regulated by governments, and they provide safe places for the poor to save, as well as offering much-needed capital and other financial services. Now out of infancy, the microfinance industry faces major challenges, including its ability to deal with mobile banking and other technology and concerns that some markets are now over-saturated with microfinance. How the industry deals with these and other challenges will determine whether it will continue to grow or will be subsumed within the larger global financial sector. This book is based on the results of a workshop at Lehigh University among thirty-four leaders in the industry. The editors, working with contributions from more than a dozen leading authorities in the field, tell the important story of how microfinance developed, how it has met the needs of hundreds of millions of people, and they address key questions about how it can continue to meet those needs in the future.