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.

Microfinance Institutions (MFI) promise to deliver poverty alleviation while being sustainable. However, in recent years, the idea of microfinance has been questioned. The study of MFIs or their business environment from a strategic management perspective has not been taken up. This is despite the fact that MFIs promise financial inclusion of the bottom-of-the-pyramid segment and, in turn, lead to sustainable development. Moreover, MFIs have to regularly negotiate various tradeoffs, the study of which could be interesting from a strategic perspective. For instance, empirical evidence suggests that MFIs face a tradeoff between profitability (financial sustainability) and outreach (reaching the poorest customers). A study of the ecosystem of MFIs from the strategic perspective would also be of interest to other stakeholders such as donors, investors, banks and government. For instance, subsidies can play an important role to help MFIs serve the poorest segment. Such subsidies may be in the form of donor and government grants, when MFIs have access to capital at below-market interest rates. This has important implications for policy makers as it shows one way where right kind of regulations could help MFIs. On the other hand, the rapid growth of microfinance has brought increasing calls for regulation, but complying with prudential regulations and the associated supervision can be especially costly for MFIs hurting their sustainability. In India, MFIs have been accused of seeking profits at the expense of the poor, attracting stringent regulations that stifled their growth. Regulatory interventions could help the MFIs to scale up and professionalize, or it may simply stifle their development. This paper attempts to approach the issue of regulatory impact on the microfinance industry from a strategic management perspective. The discussion in this paper entails a literature review that shows the importance of the industry and the regulatory effects on a firm; it then looks at some of the tradeoffs faced by MFIs and also looks at the literature on regulations of MFIs. An attempt has been made to identify the gaps in the existing literature and present them in the conclusion.

Microfinance in developing countries is a collection of studies by leading researchers in the field of microfinance. It discusses key issues that the rapidly growing microfinance industry currently faces, and offers interesting views and analysis of topical matters concerning the microfinance realm.

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.

Research on MFI performance is still in its infancy. MFIs are hybrid organizations with dual objectives. Performance studies in microfinance are therefore less straightforward compared to performance studies in traditional banking research. This book contains new MFI performance research by top scholars from across the globe.

"This book offers great insight into theoretical, policy-oriented and practical ways to address some of the challenges of using microfinance for sustainable development in Africa"--