Microcredit Quotes

Microfinance is an idea whose time has come.

I wanted to make sure that women made up half of all Grameen's borrowers. But it wasn't easy to persuade the women in Bangladesh to join the bank. A man isn't even allowed to address a woman in her village.

Microcredit has shown how you can reach out to people that conventional banking cannot. It has demonstrated that it's a doable proposition.

Microcredit is about giving hope.

A number of non-banking finance companies have entered the rural microcredit market. Many microcredit agencies have been charging interest rates not very dissimilar to those charged by moneylenders. Borrowing then becomes more to meet pressing consumption needs, rather than for farming or small-scale enterprises.

When combined with information and communication technologies, microcredit can unleash new opportunities for the world's poorest entrepreneurs and thereby revitalize the village economies they serve.

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.

If you do microcredit with men, they tend to quickly drink it. They don't pay you back.

Making loans and fighting poverty are normally two of the least glamorous pursuits around, but put the two together and you have an economic innovation that has become not just popular but downright chic. The innovation - microfinance - involves making small loans to poor entrepreneurs, usually in developing countries.

What attracted me towards microfinance is it's a very sustainable business, which has an impact on people's lives yet it can be very profitable.

The invention of the micro-loan was a big surprise to me. Who would have guessed loans of less than $20 made to poor people in undeveloped countries could create thriving local economies? And, even more surprisingly, that they more reliably pay off their debts than the wealthy of the world.

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.

The Microfinance segment is a challenging client servicing space and thus requires a great amount of dedication, integrity and teamwork.

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.