MFIs tend to lose focus as they ‘evolve’

A new report released by the Women’s World Banking (WWB) observes that as many microfinance institutions transform from non-profits to traditional financial intermediaries, they tend to shift away from their original focus on helping poor women and instead focus on making larger loans a la a traditional financial institution. The results were disheartening as the [...]

Obsessive Compulsive Metric Disorder

While my writings in the past have strongly pushed for the establishment of better metrics in quantifying social impact, the reliance on such metrics is not immune to negative outcomes. One such negative outcome is when social investors become so concerned with their own metrics that they lose sight of the larger picture — the [...]

Op-Ed: Microfinance revisited and its role in reaching the missing middle

Two weeks ago I wrote about James Surowiecki’s article in the New Yorker that brought forward the inherent limitations of microfinance to actually generate a substantial number of jobs in a developing country. Since then it seems as if I was not the only one (surprise surprise) to take notice of Surowieki’s conclusions and it [...]

Development’s Double-Edged Sword

In a largely critical piece on India’s development titled On the Road to Disaster in India in the World Politics Review, Parag Khanna paints a picture which questions the country’s rising status. Moreover, Khanna charges the government with a lack of planning that is leading to haphazard development.
To get straight to the punchline:

For all the [...]

Some things unfortunately never change…

Atanu Dey discusses a NY Times article on the discouraging state of illiteracy in India. According to the article, over 300,000,000 people are illiterate in India and there does not appear to be an coordinated effort to address it.
There can be no question that … education in India has largely failed because … education has [...]

Fair & Lovely, and may be a little bit of Dignity

Derek Newberry, a blogger at Nextbillion has a very interesting post on Ethics in the BOP Market. He uses the case of Fair & Lovely, the skin whitening cream marketed in India by Hindustan Lever, the Indian subsidiary of Unilever. The company has constantly used a advertising strategy that depicts women of darker complexion as [...]

Op-Ed: Microeffect of Microfinance

A recent article in the New Yorker echoed sentiments expressed by many venture capitalists that have begun to shift their focus on the developing world and BoP markets that microfinance, while an amazing concept for enable entrepreneurs, cannot in itself lift countries out of poverty. James Surowiecki writes:
Microloans are often used to “smooth consumption”—tiding a [...]

Eat it up … the less discussed aspect of sustainability

One ongoing topic on this blog appears to be the need to be forever conscious of the consumption dilemma that arises due to expanding markets to untapped communities, specifically BoP and the rural populous. Providing the fringes with first rate technologies and products to better their lives is an integral part of the development quest, [...]

New Idea, Old Problems

The World Bank’s PSD Blog posted yesterday on how despite the novelty of social entreprenership and its potential to change the way development operates, it still suffers from teh same pitfalls that plague traditional development models. The report cited suggests that we still have some ways to go before we can officially label the emergence of [...]