Quotes About Microfinance

#1. A well-functioning microfinance bank can actually be a profitable business as well. So it became a perfect proof point that, through business, you can provide an experience that leads to individual self-empowerment.

Pierre Omidyar

#2. Microfinance companies in India are responsible for hundreds of suicides - two hundred people in Andhra Pradesh in 2010 alone.

Anonymous

#3. Microfinance recognizes that poor people are remarkable reservoirs of energy and knowledge, posing an untapped opportunity to create markets, bring people in from the margins and give them the tools with which to help themselves.

Kofi Annan

#4. Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot. Microfinance has done more to bolster the status of women, and to protect them from abuse, than any laws could accomplish.

Nicholas D. Kristof

#5. However, as commercialization of microfinance deepens, the proportion of female clientele of microfinance institutions will decline steadily.

Godwin Ehigiamusoe

#6. Microfinance does not require previous experience or loans to the same extent as a small-business loan, so it's easier for women to enter the micro sector.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

#7. The moment you say microfinance everybody wants to help you.

Muhammad Yunus

#8. Microfinance is an incredibly powerful tool ... but we must move beyond micro-hopes and micro-ambitions for women.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

#9. She may hide it, but Clinton is a policy nerd. Ask about microfinance, and she'll talk your ear off. Mention early childhood interventions, and she will gush about obscure details of a home visitation experiment in Elmira, N.Y., that dramatically improved child outcomes.

Nicholas Kristof

#10. Microfinance stands as one of the most promising and cost-effective tools in the fight against global poverty.

Jonathan Morduch

#11. This is the basis for the most important critique of microfinance. The poor are not entrepreneurs. The idea that more than a few will turn tiny loans into a viable business is simply unrealistic.

Ian Smillie

#12. Microfinance initiatives are very high-touch models. The loan officer meets with local groups of borrowers every week, they share tips and techniques. There's a lot of training and learning that goes on, which adds to the cost of the model.

Pierre Omidyar

#13. These results stand in sharp contrast to the hype that microfinance has attracted in development policy circles. They throw cold water on models that suggest lack of access to finance is among the most important constraints that poor households face.

Dani Rodrik

#14. Field experiments to date have shown that microfinance - the provision of small loans, typically to women or groups of women - is not particularly effective in reducing poverty.14

Dani Rodrik

#15. Because microfinance is so manageable in terms of the size of the loan, people have made it the cornerstone to lifting women out of poverty.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon

#16. In 1989, I started the National Association of Business Women. We incorporated microfinance and different job training for women. We did a survey, with USAID, that found women lacked training, credit and information.

Joyce Banda

#17. We developed microfinance to fight loan sharks - I was telling people don't go to loan sharks - not trying to take advantage and make money for myself. I would be a junior loan shark if I did ... It is not a panacea.

Muhammad Yunus

#18. Microfinance is an idea whose time has come.

Kofi Annan

#19. You knew that if you survived that accident, there's no way I could ever leave you again. Not unless I want your blood on my hands. You're lucky your gamble paid off. Now you can do or say whatever you want, can't you. You've got me right where you've always wanted me.

You win.

Heather Demetrios

#20. There are 2 main things I've learned about following the Holy Spirit: It will never be easy. It will never be boring.

Mark Hart

#21. The old hunger for voyages fed at his heart ... To go alone ... into strange cities; to meet strange people and to pass again before they could know him; to wander, like his own legend, across the earth
it seemed to him there could be no better thing than that.

Thomas Wolfe

#22. It never hurt Lenny Bruce's career to get arrested for swearing. It did back in the time, but he broke those doors down by doing the stuff that he believed in.

Joe Rogan

#23. The idea that happiness could have a share in beauty would be too much of a good thing.

Walter Benjamin