Senior fellow David Roodman was mentioned in a Guardian Poverty Matters blog on the sobering reality of microfinance.
From the Article
It's like a hangover after a big party. For over a decade microfinance has boomed as donors' have poured millions into the sector – now there is a sober reckoning. David Roodman picked up on it on Tuesday in his blog on the Centre for Global Development site, calling it the "new realism". He cited two recent reports, which argue for a rebalancing of the sector.
Now another study, commissioned by the UK Department for International Development (DfID), provides a chilly accounting of microfinance's impact contrary to the lavish claims of poverty reduction and female empowerment. Maren Duvendack and her team conclude: "No clear evidence exists that microfinance programmes have positive impacts." In the course of their exhaustive review, they looked at 11 academic databases, four microfinance aggregators and eight NGOs and aid websites. That included studying nearly 3,000 articles.
Duvendack found that many of these studies were poorly designed, including prominent ones that have been very influential – among them a study funded by USAid of microfinance programmes in India, Zimbabwe and Peru. But "rigorous quantitative evidence on the nature, magnitude and balance of microfinance impact is still scarce and inconclusive", Duvendack says.