Microfinance
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Microfinance
Microfinance consists of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses (SMEs) who lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings account, savings and checking accounts; microinsurance; and payment systems, among other services. Microfinance product and services in MFI include: # Savings # Microcredit # Microinsurance # Microleasing and # Fund transfer/remittance. Microfinance services are designed to reach excluded customers, usually low income population segments, possibly socially marginalized, or geographically more isolated, and to help them become self-sufficient.Peck Christen, Robert; Rosenberg, Richard; Jayadeva, Veena. ''Financial institutions with a double-bottom line: Implications for the future of microfinance''. CGAP, Occasional Papers series, July 2004, pp. 2–3. ID Ghana is an example of a microfinance institution. Microfinance initially had a ...
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Microloans
Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to impoverished borrowers who typically do not have access to traditional banking services due to a lack of collateral (finance), collateral, steady employment, and a verifiable credit history. The primary aim of microcredit is to support entrepreneurship, facilitate self-employment, and alleviate poverty, particularly in low-income communities The United Nations declared 2005 as the International Year of Microcredit to raise awareness of microfinance as a strategy for poverty reduction and financial inclusion. By the early 2010s, microcredit had expanded significantly across developing countries, with estimates suggesting that more than 200 million people were beneficiaries of microcredit services worldwide. While widely adopted, the effectiveness of microcredit remains debated, with mixed evidence on its long-term impact on poverty alleviation. Despite its widespread adoption, the impact of microcredit on poverty al ...
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Muhammad Yunus
Muhammad Yunus (born 28 June 1940) is a Bangladeshi economist, entrepreneur, and civil society leader who has been serving as the Chief Adviser of Bangladesh, Chief Adviser of the Interim government of Muhammad Yunus, interim Yunus ministry, government of Bangladesh since 8 August 2024. Yunus pioneered the modern concept of microcredit and microfinance, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 as the first Bangladeshi. He is the founder of Grameen Bank. Born in Hathazari Upazila, Hathazari, Chittagong District, Chittagong, Yunus passed his matriculation and intermediate examinations from Chittagong Collegiate School and Chittagong College, respectively. He completed his BA from University of Dhaka and joined as a lecturer in Chittagong College. He obtained his PhD in economics from Vanderbilt University in the United States. After the Bangladesh famine of 1974, devastating famine of 1974, Yunus started to work on poverty elevation in Bangladesh. He began experim ...
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Grameen Bank
Grameen Bank () is a microfinance, specialized community development bank founded in Bangladesh. It provides small loans (known as microcredit or "grameencredit") to the impoverished without requiring collateral. Grameen Bank is a statutory public authority. It is originated in 1976, in the work of Muhammad Yunus, a professor at the University of Chittagong, who launched a research project to study how to design a credit delivery system to provide banking services to the rural poor. In October 1983, the Grameen Bank was authorized by national legislation to operate as an independent bank. In 1998, the Bank's "Low-cost Housing Program" won a World Habitat Award. In 2006, the bank and its founder, Muhammad Yunus, were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The bank's success has inspired similar projects in more than 64 countries around the world, including a World Bank initiative to finance Grameen-type lending systems. History Muhammad Yunus was inspired during the Ba ...
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Credit Union
A credit union is a member-owned nonprofit organization, nonprofit cooperative financial institution. They may offer financial services equivalent to those of commercial banks, such as share accounts (savings accounts), share draft accounts (checking account, cheque accounts), credit cards, Credit (finance), credit, share term certificates (Certificate of deposit, certificates of deposit), and online banking. Normally, only a member of a credit union may deposit account, deposit or loan, borrow money. In several African countries, credit unions are commonly referred to as ''SACCOs'' (''savings and credit co-operatives''). Worldwide, credit union systems vary significantly in their total assets and average institution asset size, ranging from volunteer operations with a handful of members to institutions with hundreds of thousands of members and assets worth billions of US dollars. In 2018, the number of members in credit unions worldwide was 375 million, with over 100 millio ...
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Microcredit Summit Campaign
The Microcredit Summit Campaign, an American non-profit organization, started as an effort to bring together microcredit practitioners, advocates, educational institutions, donor agencies, international financial institutions, non-governmental organizations and others involved with microcredit around the goal of alleviating world poverty through microfinance. History The first Microcredit Summit was held February 2–4, 1997 in Washington, DC. The first summit had approximately 3,000 in attendance from 137 countries. Hillary Clinton gave the keynote speech at the first Summit. The outcome of the first Summit was the launch of a "campaign" to reach 100 million of the world's poorest families, especially the women of those families, with credit for self-employment and other financial and business services by the year 2005. In January 2009, to coincide with the release of the State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2009 (SOCR), the Microcredit Summit Campaign announced ...
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Akhtar Hameed Khan
Akhter Hameed Khan (, pronounced ; 15 July 1914 – 9 October 1999) was a Pakistani-Bangladeshi development practitioner and social scientist. He promoted participatory rural development in Pakistan, West Pakistan, Bangladesh, East Pakistan and other developing countries, and widely advocated community participation in development. His particular contribution was the establishment of a comprehensive project for rural development, the Comilla Model (1959). It earned him the Ramon Magsaysay Award from the Philippines and an honorary Doctorate of law from Michigan State University. In the 1980s he started a bottom-up community development initiative of Orangi Pilot Project, based in the outskirts of Karachi, which became a model of participatory development initiatives. He also directed many programmes, from microcredit to self-finance and from housing provision to family planning, for rural communities and urban slums. It earned him international recognition and Civil decorations o ...
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Microinsurance
Microinsurance is the protection of low-income people (defined as those living on more than approximately $1 but less than $4 per day) against specific perils in exchange for regular premium payment proportionate to the likelihood and cost of the risks involved. This definition is exactly the same as one might use for regular insurance except for the clearly prescribed target market: low-income people. The target population typically consists of persons ignored by mainstream commercial and social insurance schemes, as well as persons who have not previously had access to appropriate insurance products. The institutions or set of institutions implementing microinsurance are commonly referred to as a microinsurance scheme. Definitions #Microinsurance is insurance with low premiums and low caps / coverage. In this definition, "micro" refers to the small financial transaction that each insurance policy generates. "General micro insurance product means health insurance contract, any ...
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Poverty
Poverty is a state or condition in which an individual lacks the financial resources and essentials for a basic standard of living. Poverty can have diverse Biophysical environment, environmental, legal, social, economic, and political causes and effects. When evaluating poverty in statistics or economics there are two main measures: ''absolute poverty'' which compares income against the amount needed to meet basic needs, basic personal needs, such as food, clothing, and Shelter (building), shelter; secondly, ''relative poverty'' measures when a person cannot meet a minimum level of living standards, compared to others in the same time and place. The definition of ''relative poverty'' varies from one country to another, or from one society to another. Statistically, , most of the world's population live in poverty: in Purchasing Power Parity, PPP dollars, 85% of ...
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Pawnbroker
A pawnbroker is an individual that offers secured loans to people, with items of personal property used as Collateral (finance), collateral. A pawnbrokering business is called a pawnshop, and while many items can be pawned, pawnshops typically accept jewelry, musical instruments, coins, gold, silver, firearms; as well as home audio equipment, computers, video game systems, televisions, cameras, and power tools being included as the world entered the Information Age. The items ''pawned'' to the broker or shop are themselves called pledge (law), ''pledges'', ''pawns'', or simply ''the collateral''. If an item is pawned for a loan (colloquially "hocked" or "popped"), within a certain contractual period of time the pawner may redeem it for the amount of the loan plus some agreed-upon amount for interest. In the United States the amount of time, and rate of interest, is governed by law and by the state commerce department policies. They have the same license as a bank, which is ...
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Encyclopedia Britannica
An encyclopedia is a reference work or compendium providing summaries of knowledge, either general or special, in a particular field or discipline. Encyclopedias are divided into article (publishing), articles or entries that are arranged Alphabetical order, alphabetically by article name or by thematic categories, or else are hyperlinked and searchable. Encyclopedia entries are longer and more detailed than those in most dictionary, dictionaries. Generally speaking, encyclopedia articles focus on ''factual information'' concerning the subject named in the article's title; this is unlike dictionary entries, which focus on Linguistics, linguistic information about words, such as their etymology, meaning, pronunciation, use, and grammar, grammatical forms.Béjoint, Henri (2000)''Modern Lexicography'', pp. 30–31. Oxford University Press. Encyclopedias have existed for around 2,000 years and have evolved considerably during that time as regards language (written in a major inte ...
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Bangladesh
Bangladesh, officially the People's Republic of Bangladesh, is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by population, eighth-most populous country in the world and among the List of countries and dependencies by population density, most densely populated with a population of over 171 million within an area of . Bangladesh shares land borders with India to the north, west, and east, and Myanmar to the southeast. It has a coastline along the Bay of Bengal to its south and is separated from Bhutan and Nepal by the Siliguri Corridor, and from China by the List of Indian states, Indian state of Sikkim to its north. Dhaka, the capital and list of cities and towns in Bangladesh, largest city, is the nation's political, financial, and cultural centre. Chittagong is the second-largest city and the busiest port of the country. The territory of modern Bangladesh was a stronghold of many List of Buddhist kingdoms and empires, Buddhist and List of Hindu empir ...
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