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Thursday, April 30, 2026
News and Views from the Global South
Credible Future - Can Micro Loans Make a Macro Difference?
DEVELOPMENT-LATAM: Banks Belatedly Chase Migrant Dollars
Latin American banks, having long ignored the region's lower-income citizens, have inadvertently created a situation in which marketplace opportunities in remittances and microfinance are rapidly expanding.DEVELOPMENT-LATAM: Workers Abroad Transform Life at Home
Rising migration and soaring remittances from abroad are creating the so-called "multiplying effects" that economists have long been waiting for, and they are influencing a range of economic activity.DEVELOPMENT-LATAM: Tapping the Power of Self-Determination
Nobody knows when remittances or migration will stop increasing or start declining, but one of the unwavering challenges presented by these flows of money and people is how to leverage them into sustainable development.DEVELOPMENT-LATAM: Influx of Dollars, Exodus of People
The social effects of remittances from migrant workers and the growing business of microfinance may not lend themselves as easily to news headlines as their economic or financial impacts, but that does not make them any less significant.DEVELOPMENT-LATAM: Toward a New Financial Democracy?
Two multi-billion-dollar industries are converging in Latin America, driven entirely by lower-income citizens trying to improve their economic situations.CUBA-US: New Squeeze on Family Remittances
An increased tax on remittances sent to Cuba in dollars will bolster the flow of foreign exchange into state coffers, but will create further difficulties for the hundreds of thousands of families who are divided between Cuba and the United States.FINANCE: In Search of New Clients, Latin Bank Eyes Poor
The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) unveiled a five-year plan Tuesday to invest at least three billion dollars in loans to Latin America that would cater to millions of marginalised low-income consumers whom the Bank sees as a potentially lucrative market for international and local businesses.ECONOMY-GUINEA: Micro-Finance, Macro Interest Rates
Since being introduced in Guinea in 1989, micro- credit organisations have made their mark. Take the case of Batouly Diallo.DEVELOPMENT: Netherlands to Find Energy for 10 Million
The Netherlands wants to provide sustainable energy to 10 million people in developing countries by 2015.PAKISTAN: Free at Last, From Generations of Bonded Labour
Just 22, Jai Kumar, a teacher, knows what he wants for his students at the informal school for 'freed' bonded labour near this southern Pakistani city. ''I'm going to make sure that none of them ever end up working at the young age I was forced to. Each one of them will enroll in the government school once I'm through with them,'' he asserts.ARGENTINA: Urban Gardens Provide More than Just Food
The community gardens initially created to help confront the effects of the late 2001 economic collapse in Argentina have now "grown" into a government-run urban agriculture programme, which provides unemployed workers with much more than just food for their families' tables.PAKISTAN: Islamic Banking Is Microcredit Too
When Shamim Akhtar's 20-year-old daughter developed an acute case of ulcers, last year, and had to be hospitalised, she had little choice but to approach a neighbourhood moneylender and borrow Rs 20,000 (330 US dollars). Akhtar's husband was unemployed at that time.SOUTH AMERICA: The Business of Legal Coca
Micro-businesses in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia that use the legendary coca leaf in manufacturing medicine, soft drinks, soaps, chewing gum and other products are staking their hopes for success on one man: Evo Morales.NIGERIA: Loans In Kind For Farmers Improves Food Security
PROSAB or Promoting Sustainable Agriculture in Borno State is a micro-credit project with a difference in northern Nigeria.TSUNAMI IMPACT: Mixed Blessing for Most Marginalised
Although Chellapappa lost two of her children to the tsunami that smashed every home in the fishing village of Samanthanpettai on Dec. 26, 2004, she now has reason to smile: a brand new concrete-roof home with electricity, running water and a sanitary toilet.SOUTH AFRICA: Microfinance Groups Need to Learn from Bangladesh Experience
South Africa's microfinance institutions face stiff competition from loan sharks who prey on the vulnerable, especially in the townships where a majority of the country's poor live, say microfinance experts.FINANCE-KENYA: Small Loans for Men Will Keep Violence Against Women Down
Micro-credit facilities for men could emerge as a powerful tool to check the alarming increase in cases of violence against women in Kenya.LABOUR: Villages Taste the Fruits of China’s Urban Boom
As the amounts of money migrant workers send home globally every year continue to grow, a new study estimates the volume of money transferred by migrants within China's borders to be bigger than any cross-border market in the world.DEVELOPMENT: Microcredit Poised to Reach 100 Million Families
Last year, more than 92 million families - most of them living on less than a dollar a day - benefitted from small loans known as "microcredit", marking a bright spot in international development efforts too often frustrated by missed targets and broken promises.PAKISTAN: Small Loans Pull Women Out of Poverty Trap
A small loan of 8,000 rupees, about 160 dollars, has enabled 35-year-old seamstress Laila to expand her business and escape the glass ceiling of rural Pakistan's patriarchal culture.WTO-SPECIAL: Egypt Cottons On To Its Interests
Like other countries in the region, Egypt has much to sell but runs into barriers. And like others, it wants something to emerge from the trade ministers meeting in Hong Kong later this month to break those barriers - amidst doubts that this will happen.« Previous Page — Next Page »
Thousands of microfinance institutions serve tens of millions of the world's poor, through massive operations in rural South Asia to fledgling enterprises in West African towns. This small-scale loan movement aimed at alleviating poverty can offer life-changing potential for people who would otherwise find it difficult to obtain loans from the traditional banking sector. But microcredit is not a miracle solution to ending global poverty. If high interest rates prevail, putting recipients at risk of repeat borrowing and cycles of debt, microfinance can also have unintended consequences. IPS tracks the spread of microcredit and its impact across the global South.
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IPS gratefully acknowledges the support of the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation for Development (AECID) and the Microcredit Summit Campaign
