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> Posted by Henry Jackelen, Jackelen Associates

This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.

We’ve always known that microcredit is not a panacea.

During the heady days of the microcredit revolution in the 1980s and 90s, I was part of a veritable village of practitioners. It was a remarkable group of driven, passionate, and often iconoclastic individuals. We lived in our own Utopia, defining and inventing the concept of social enterprise. But even then we knew that our microcredit efforts weren’t perfect.

When I first visited Bangladesh in 1983, my role was to review the Grameen and BRAC programs as part of developing a new World Bank program (which proposed what became known as the Palli Karma Shayak Foundation or PKSF, a successful Apex for MFIs). Read the rest of this entry »