Huimin Microcredit client engaging in budgeting exercise

Poor rural women in China face challenges not dissimilar to poor rural women in other developing countries. Many are homemakers and child rearers, with much of their work tied to the home, offering little social or professional mobility. However, there are some dynamics in China that make women’s conditions somewhat different. The Communist Revolution of 1949 promulgated an ideology that favored gender equality and claimed women “hold up half the sky” (半边天). According to a recent study by the World Economic Forum, gender inequality is more apparent in the developed economies of Japan and Italy than in China. Modern China’s One-Child Policy, however, leads to a cultural view that “values males and belittles females” (重男轻女). The fact that China’s gender ratio skews towards males may support this view and suggest that parents favor males. Additionally, China’s massive urbanization continues to create large flows of migrant workers, posing other challenges for women. Husbands often find work in neighboring provinces or eastern coastal cities, leaving their wives to manage the household’s finances and run the family business independently.

The management of household finances offers an interesting vantage point for considering not only gender equality in China, but also the opportunity to empower women through financial training. This forms the logic behind a financial education project PlaNet Finance China (PFC) is currently implementing. Supported by Diageo’s Plan W program (which supports non-profit projects that advance women’s empowerment), the project provides rural women in China with financial education to promote their ownership over household economic decision-making, thereby delivering empowerment. PlaNet Finance China works with Huimin Microcredit Company, a vanguard of rural microfinance in China, to embed light touch financial education for women throughout their lending practices. Instead of classroom-style seminars, PFC and Diageo designed a series of innovative tools for use at the MFI and at home including interactive budgeting e-calendars and “choose your own [financial] adventure” style readers. Huimin is an ideal distribution channel, given its 90 percent female client base. Most rural MFIs share this characteristic, whereas urban MFIs are more gender neutral.

When we spoke with one woman who makes economic decisions in the household, she said: “My husband, he oversees all of it, he makes the decisions. But I have to calculate and manage those decisions myself. ”

This woman is a mother of three, with her own plot of land whose corn crops she single-handedly manages in order to afford schooling for her children, house repairs, and food. She has decided to borrow money from a local microfinance institution, with a signed contract in her name. A conversation between her and her loan officer reveals why the microfinance institution lends directly to her:

Client: “Why is it always women that sign these forms and not the men?”

Loan Officer: “Because women are tied to the land. Their husbands make the majority of income necessary to support the family, but they must leave the village to find work, and pose more of a risk for us when it comes to collecting interest payments or avoiding a loan-default scenario. Their wives must stay to raise the children, manage the household, and work in the fields. They are less of a risk for us.”

Loan officer reviewing financial exercises with clients

Financial Inclusion through Financial Education

What’s illuminating here is the fact that, due to women being unable to move, this MFI seems to “trust” them with microloans more than men. This may suggest that with the right skills and training, women that sign microloan contracts could not just be doing more for their families, but could also be bigger contributors to the country’s economy, which is soon set to be the world’s largest. Yet, even with such a vital global economy, the Chinese population is not very financially literate. In a 2012 study by Visa, China ranked 14^th out of 27 countries in financial literacy, behind countries like Belarus and Bosnia. In the same study, China ranked 18^th out of 27 in household budgeting practices. With the right financial training, women in China, especially in rural areas, could emerge with an important role in building financial inclusion.

But what is the right financial training? Women in rural China, similar to the rural poor in other regions of the world, already seem to be adept at managing finances. As Portfolios of the Poor shows us, many impoverished people lead complex financial lives and make use of both formal and informal tools. However, for rural women in China, their financial understanding could be more standardized and context-relevant. In Ningxia province, for example, where farm land is recovering from desertification, income from agriculture can be unreliable as can the wages from migrant labor that men pursue. Both amount and frequency of remittances from husbands can be in flux. Such irregularities in money flows make particular lessons in formal financial education, such as investment diversification, more critical. Compared to other markets, interestingly, lessons in savings are not as helpful to China’s rural clients. Chinese culture already champions savings habits. And lessons in mobile banking, while intriguing and innovative, don’t have the same immediacy given a lack of sophisticated telecommunications infrastructure in China’s rural areas.

The experiences of the rural Huimin microfinance institution in China, as well as distinct gaps in financial knowledge, show us that there is a big opportunity in advancing financial inclusion in the country starting with financial training for women who are the principal recipients of microloans and ultimately the ones who manage many household budgets. If women continue to be rurally isolated, knowledge and service deprived, and “tied to the land,” then financial inclusion can start with them.

Have you read?

Ratings to Loosen the Regulatory Noose on China’s Microcredit Companies

Designing Financial Services for China’s Marginalized

China’s Microfinance Landscape: Nonprofits, Microcredit Companies, Rural Financers, and Alibaba

In 2009, Portfolios of the Poor illustrated a rich array of formal and informal financial services and money management practices used by the poor. For this reason, it has become a foundational text for development professionals seeking to address poverty through financial inclusion.

The Last Hunger Season: A Year in an African Farm Community on the Brink of Change, by journalist and author Roger Thurow, chronicles the lives of four smallholder farmers in Kenya over a year’s time. His conclusions further enrich our understanding of household financial decision-making processes and tradeoffs made by the poor on a daily basis.

Along the way Thurow describes the critical role that the Kenya-based One Acre Fund plays in improving agricultural knowledge and practices by providing training and credit for agricultural inputs such as seed and fertilizer to families that have one acre of land or less. All four families followed in the book are One Acre Fund program participants.

The Last Hunger Season provides some important lessons for us as financial service practitioners. It helps us re-frame how we view client impact and design impact assessments. Let’s look at a few themes.

Think of “impact” or “change” in poverty in a more comprehensive way. Thurow shares the story of Leonida, a 42-year-old Kenyan mother of seven children. Several times each year, she must choose between feeding her children and paying school fees to keep her oldest son in a boarding school. Hunger is the tradeoff that Leonida accepts because she sees education as the ticket to a better future for her children and her family.

When we only look at reported hunger as a metric for smallholder farmers, for example, given this information we might conclude that the program is failing Leonida. However, when we expand our assessment, we might see that the increase in income is directed toward education—to the detriment of family nutrition and health in the short term. However, this attention to education is deliberate and reflects the values and priorities of this family.

By only monitoring and measuring the “direct” benefits of a program, we risk getting an inaccurate picture of change or impacts at the household level. It’s important to note that to date, with participation in the One Acre Fund program, Leonida’s production has increased from three 90-kilogram bags of maize to 10.

Qualitative observations can provide rich insights into what “impact” is. Perhaps the most striking takeaway from The Last Hunger Season is that when we use only quantitative measures, we are hard pressed to fully understand the impacts of a program.

As Thurow follows the families and illustrates the difficult decisions they make (and the underlying reasons behind those decisions), we are forced to wonder whether the research methods that we, as practitioners and researchers, rely on to assess the outcomes of a project can effectively capture this type of decision-making in action.

For example, one day, two of Leonida’s daughters return home from their local school, in the middle of the day, to collect school fees for their tuition. They have been asked not to return to school until they can pay their fees. They have missed lunch at school, and Leonida also has nothing to offer them to eat.

She knows that if she doesn’t pay the full amount of the school fees for her oldest son, he will surely be sent home and all of her past efforts to keep him in school will be for naught. So, she makes a difficult decision. By allowing her youngest (female) children to go hungry, she keeps the majority of the money for her oldest (male). She sends the two youngest back to school with partial payment, hoping this will buy her time to make a full payment later when she can find other ways to gather the funds.

If we evaluate this in terms of where did you spend your money?, we would see that she spent money on school fees. However, it is equally important to understand what she did NOT spend her money on as well as her reason to prioritize school fees over food. Leonida explains, “A person with one child who is a doctor or lawyer is above a person with seven children who haven’t been educated.”

Seasonality matters. Though this is not a new concept, as we follow the four families through a year, we come to fully appreciate another challenge we have in understanding client impact: the time of year that we conduct a client assessment can make a big difference in what we find.

When clients are interviewed at the height of the “hungry season,” we are not going to detect very positive outcomes. Conversely, if we conduct our assessments immediately after the harvest, we risk overestimating client well-being, as it can be short-lived. As Andrew Youn, President of Once Acre Fund notes, “Harvest time is a time to dream. To dream of improving lives, feeding families, sending children to school, investing in livestock.”

Some research methods and assessments take seasonality into account. Thurow reminds us of the importance of factoring in seasonality when designing assessments and interpreting the results.

Measuring hope and “softer” impacts. At the end of the year, along with increases in harvest results, hope appears to be one of the tangible impacts of One Acre’s credit and agricultural support program.

One could easily argue that Thurow wrote the book to elicit this emotion in the reader. But it’s possible that there is more here than just a writing style; it suggests an important consideration for us when we design evaluations of both short- and long-term program impact.

We typically evaluate the benefits of access to and use of microfinance products using quantifiable measures – for example, agricultural output, household income, business revenues, amount of savings, increase in assets, and others. Yet, we could learn a lot more about some of the “softer” impacts such as client attitudes and perceptions about their lives, including hope.

Instead of approaching household outcomes only by whether there was more income in one year’s time, what if we instead accepted that a client’s perception of her well-being is an adequate composite for assessing her comprehensive, complicated financial and non-financial life? Or, in the least, what if we incorporated these “soft” aspects as integral components for gauging program impact?

We know that we can’t prove impact by relying only on hope and a positive perception of a client’s current life or future—or can we? Thurow paints a compelling picture that illustrates why and how the process of moving out of poverty is slow and painstaking. He makes the point that hope seems to be the vital fuel that helps propel this engine forward. Attitudes and perceptions may turn out to be a more accurate indicator of wellbeing than a long list of quantifiable indicators. It is something we should test. If smallholder farmers are hanging onto hope for a better future, perhaps we as evaluators should as well.

In part two of this post I’ll discuss some of the client-centered program design insights shared in The Last Hunger Season.

*This post was modified from its original version on June 25, 2014.

Image credit: The Last Hunger Season

Have you read?

Climate Change Adaptation for Smallholder Farmers

Agriculture Microinsurance in Africa: To Subsidize or Not to Subsidize?

Asset-Based Financing and Flexible Repayment Schedules to Better Serve Africa’s Smallholder Farmers

The following post was originally published on the Grameen Foundation Insights Blog. It’s the first part of Counts’ two-part post on scarcity and its implications for microfinance and poverty alleviation. Part two can be found here.

The field of behavioral economics – the intersection of psychology and economics – is fairly new. This is a partial explanation of why its lessons have not yet been applied much to microfinance and anti-poverty programs generally. But this is clearly changing, and none-too-soon, as microfinance in particular is in need of reinvention and rebranding.

In fact, I am coming to believe that thoughtful applications of behavioral economics can be a central part of defining and realizing the idea of “responsible microfinance” that the Microfinance CEO Working Group and others are championing and also “full financial inclusion” that moves the dial on poverty.

An excellent new book titled Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (Times Books, 2013), will make this process of leveraging the insights of behavioral economics into microfinance much easier. Drawing on decades of research, it focuses on an analysis of the phenomenon of scarcity – having too little of anything important to the human experience – and the implications of that analysis for policy and practice.

A note of caution. Lest behavioral economics becomes a new fad in international development and microfinance, or worse yet that I receive part of the blame for that, let me say something clearly. I see behavioral economics as an important lens, which is to say a powerful vantage point to look at efforts to reduce poverty and improve the human condition. Gender is another powerful lens. Race, political economy, biology, mental health, and asset building are also potentially useful lenses.

Now, let me explore a bit what the world looks like when viewed through this lens.

Understanding Poverty through the Psychology and Economics of Scarcity

The study of scarcity through the discipline of behavioral economics tells us something profoundly important. When the human mind perceives scarcity of anything important – money, time, or human contact, to cite three examples – it starts behaving in fundamentally different ways. It focuses on managing and alleviating the short-term scarcity, and in general it does that very effectively. The authors call this the “focus dividend.” Research cited in the book shows, for example, that many dimensions of performance are improved in a situation of scarcity.

Examples of this enhanced performance can be a bit startling. Poor people, it turns out, have a deeper understanding of pricing information than those who are wealthier. For example, when grocery stores try to trick you into believing that buying in bulk saves you money (when in fact it does not), poor people are better able to discern this ruse than wealthier people, despite their generally lower levels of education. Another study focused on how people tend to overestimate the value of certain price reductions and underestimate others. It turns out that the poor people are better able to properly weigh their options in such contexts than professional economists (a large group of whom took the same test)!

The authors’ conclusion: “[The poor] have a specific skill: they are better at making ends meet today. They make a dollar go further. They become experts in the value of money.” Interestingly, this improved performance cannot be created artificially. In other words, the mind cannot be tricked into a false sense of scarcity as a way to improve certain dimensions of performance.

But these benefits, in the form of elevated performance, come at a surprisingly significant cost. To use the authors’ terminology, focusing on managing scarcity takes up a lot of a person’s finite mental “bandwidth” or cognitive capacity. (To illustrate this, they describe how individual farmers score significantly higher on IQ tests post-harvest, compared to scarcity-prone pre-harvest – moments in time separated by just a few weeks.) As a result of the absorption of bandwidth (or attention) that scarcity causes, all of the other issues that a person faces, including long-term choices that impact the scarcity they are experiencing (and long-term thinking generally), are neglected. In other words, performance in all other areas declines, often much more dramatically than one would imagine.

The authors give an example of how their ability to score on their favorite video games dropped off significantly as they were approaching the hard and challenging deadline for completing their manuscript, a situation where they were experiencing time scarcity. They were not surprised by the drop-off itself, but by its magnitude. And these are some of the world experts in the behavioral economics field! This suggests how easy it is to underestimate the impact of the mono-focus that scarcity causes on performance in other areas (i.e., those areas unrelated to managing that immediate scarcity).

The lower performance in those other areas is a result of what the authors call “tunneling,” their term for describing how people focus on managing scarcity and tend to ignore almost everything else. I suppose they gravitated to this term due to the popularity of the expression “tunnel vision” (which Merriam-Webster defines as “a tendency to think about only one thing and to ignore everything else”). They say tunneling is effectively a “bandwidth tax” – and one of unexpectedly large proportions.

Sometimes, the tunneling mentality leads to actions that alleviate scarcity in the short-term, but reinforce scarcity in the long-term. The greater the scarcity, the more pronounced the degree of tunneling. One of the most tangible examples of what happens when human beings tunnel is “borrowing.” This can be in the form of a loan (borrowed money) to alleviate immediate financial needs. Or it can be allocating excessive amounts of one’s schedule to meet an impending deadline, a phenomenon the authors term “borrowing time” and which they argue functions much like borrowing money. The only hope to get people to mentally focus on things other than managing the immediate scarcity is to “get inside the tunnel,” which is difficult but not impossible to do. (The book outlines some techniques for getting people who are tunneling to pay attention to other issues, but this is clearly an area for further research and experimentation.)

Another important concept is “juggling” – the fact that people and organizations managing scarcity tend to be unable to get out in front of their problems because it is all they can do to catch the ball that is about to fall and throw it back up in the air. This is why predictable expenses, such as school fees or the need to buy fertilizer, are experienced by the poor as if they were unexpected “shocks,” such as a flash flood or a sudden illness.

“Juggling is why predictable events are treated like shocks,” the authors explain. They extend this thought with some additional observations that reinforce and explain the complex financial behaviors described in Portfolios of the Poor: “[M]anaging scarcity leads to a messy balance sheet…. As we reach repeatedly for the most proximate solution to our most immediate problem, over time these short-term fixes create a complex web of commitments. The result is a messy patchwork of assets and obligations. For the busy, this means burdened and contorted schedules … [and] for the poor, it means complicated financial lives.”

Through the lens of behavioral economics and its analysis of scarcity, many perplexing behaviors exhibited by poor, overcommitted and lonely people are much more easily explained. I will resist the temptation to summarize more of them here, which is perhaps my way of encouraging you to read the book!

Among the interesting implications of the authors’ analysis is that this phenomenon – managing scarcity – applies equally to the rich and the poor, to the educated and the illiterate, and to those whose scarcity is in money or in time (though they recognized that money scarcity, or poverty, has some special dimensions). The implications for public policy, managing groups and organizations, designing anti-poverty programs, and leading one’s personal life are drawn out in some detail. On Wednesday, in part two of this blog, I will turn to the implications I see for thinking about and practicing microfinance and poverty alleviation more broadly.

To read part two of this post, click here.

Have you read?

Alex Counts: What I Learned at the FI2020 Global Forum

Alex Counts on Karlan and Appel’s “More Than Good Intentions”

Kate McKee: On the Behavioral Economics of Poverty and Implications for Financial Inclusion

The following post was originally published in the Guardian Development Professionals Network DAI Partner Zone.

When the Global Findex, an unprecedented demand-side survey by the World Bank and Gallup, was released last year, it marked the first time financial inclusion statistics from the demand side were available on a globally consistent basis. The headline: 2.5 billion adults (including 59 percent of adults in developing countries) are “unbanked” — that is, they do not have an account at a bank or other formal financial institution.

Why is having a bank account the top indicator of financial inclusion?

Setting aside the obvious point that bank accounts are among the easiest indicators to track, the policy focus on “banking the unbanked” seems to rest on the premise that bank accounts have a special role in financial inclusion. Three important functions ascribed to bank accounts are: a place to save, a money management hub, and a way to establish an ongoing relationship with a formal financial institution (an “on-ramp” to other services). These assumptions appear to underpin much of financial inclusion thinking and policy.

If a bank account is a money management tool – a central node through which a person’s financial transactions flow – it will be used regularly. This is the way most people in the developed world (and, I suspect, most financial inclusion policy makers) use bank accounts. However, many accounts in the developing world are relatively inactive. Taking the frequency with which people make more than two withdrawals per month as a proxy for operating an account as a money management hub, the following chart divides the “banked” into low – and high – activity accounts.

Bank Account Ownership and Activity, by Country Income Groupings

The chart suggests that as a measure of genuine inclusion, the number of people who have accounts (“banked”) is deceptively high. If instead we define financial inclusion as having an active account, inclusion in the developing world is far lower than generally understood. Nearly two-thirds (64.2 percent) of adults in rich countries have accounts and use them actively; in the poorest countries, only a quarter of adults have an account (23.7 percent), and only 3.8 percent of adults are active account users. There is a profound difference in the way people in the developed and developing worlds manage their money.

Progress toward real inclusion requires a deeper look at the role of bank accounts in people’s financial lives and money management is a central concept for that purpose. Financial inclusion policy makers and providers must understand how financially included and excluded people manage their money, because improved money management is in itself one of the main objectives of financial inclusion and because wrong assumptions about money management can lead to failed products and client indifference.

What is money management?

Everyone manages his or her money somehow. Client research, such as reported in Portfolios of the Poor (Daryl Collins, et al., 2009) and the Financial Diaries, shows that even very poor people conduct complex financial lives – as suggested through the term portfolios. To deal with low and uneven income streams, they utilize many kinds of financial arrangements. As Collins says, “They keep savings at home; join savings clubs and savings-and-loan clubs; transact with family, friends and neighbors, and employers; and, where doing so is feasible and attractive, sign on with formal licensed providers.”

This kind of money management contrasts with that practiced by an “included” middle-class person in a developed economy. With apologies, I draw on my own experience. My bank account is my main money management tool. All my significant routine transactions pass through the account, including salary, debit card purchases, major payments (taxes, insurance, mortgage), and monthly bills. Credit card purchases are incorporated when paid as a monthly bill. Even cash transactions are consolidated as ATM withdrawals. For my personal balance sheet, I consult a few additional documents, like mortgage, pension, and investment records. My bank account is the central node for my transactions and a tracking device for my financial life.

What happens when people operating in the informal sector are offered bank accounts? They do not shift abruptly from informal to formal money management. Many people continue tracking informally; the bank account is just one transaction type in the mix. Many people in developing countries appear to use their accounts simply as a way to receive money such as a salary or government benefits. This may cost less and be more secure than cash, but it is often the payer rather than the payee who benefits most from this shift.

The transition from an unwritten form of money management with multiple transaction types to one based around a bank account is unlikely to be swift or easy, and would not be completed in one leap. While we acknowledge that a bank account puts people on a path that can lead to financial inclusion, we cannot be at all certain that they are proceeding down the path.

I once interviewed coffee farmers in the hills of Uganda who were frequently attacked by highway robbers on their way home from receiving their proceeds. They traveled most of a day to town where a coffee marketing company clerk handed out envelopes with their payments in cash. On the way home they were prey to attackers who knew their pockets would be full. Then the system improved: the coffee marketing company arranged with a cooperative bank to distribute the payments into bank accounts in each farmer’s name. But the farmers still traveled to town, stood in line at the cooperative bank, and took most of their cash home. Why? Because they could not use the money in their village if it was sitting in the bank in town. They were still prey to robbers, and their lives changed little. However, they would now show up in national statistics as “banked.”

Only if the cooperative bank puts a branch, ATM, or a banking or mobile money agent in the village will the farmers’ money management habits change significantly. The most relevant factors include who the farmers do business with, where they are located, and what kinds of payments they accept.

Does technology help money management?

Technology has the potential to allow financial transactions to take place without cash, in more locations, and at any time. Technology-enabled financial services (cards and mobile money) can provide enormous benefits in cost, convenience, and security. But can they assist money management?

As currently configured, these services often focus on individual transactions. The customer brings cash to an agent, the money is moved electronically, and the recipient withdraws cash from another agent. End of transaction, end of relationship. Clients who keep track of their financial status in their heads may want nothing further. However, if financial inclusion policy is interested in assisting people to keep track more effectively or make better money management decisions, it might ask for more – such as the ability to store money for multiple transactions and review transactions records over time.

At present, few technology innovations integrate tracking features to assist with money management. (Ironically, there is excitement over provider use of the electronic traces of transactions for “big data” analytics.) In his article on “Making Mobile Money Daily Relevant,” Ignacio Mas proposes a system he calls PayPlan that would allow people to personalize mobile money accounts to make recurring payments or set portions of their income aside (Social Science Research Network, March 18, 2012). Mobile accounts can play the money management role usually associated with a bank account, he believes – possibly even better as the information would always be at a customer’s fingertips.

Two conditions are necessary to make this shift, and both should receive more policy and provider attention. The first condition is consolidation of most of a person’s transactions onto a single platform, so that account activity becomes a good proxy for personal cashflow. This requires penetration of the surrounding merchant environment. The second is the electronic provision of ready and useful information about a customer’s financial status.

Advice for policymakers

While possession of a bank account may be a step toward inclusion, it should not be confused with genuine inclusion. The chasm between a policy goal of “banking the unbanked” and a description of a financially capable person is wide. Policymakers must pay close attention to usage and the factors that influence it and employ indicators that reveal such patterns.

Policymakers and product designers must be careful not to assume that everyone wants to change their money management methods to emulate those of middle class people in rich countries. If we wish to assist people to use more formal financial products tomorrow, we must reckon with how they manage their money today.

Image credits: Alamy; DAI 

Have you read?

Seven Trends to Watch in the March to Achieve Full Financial Inclusion for All?

What’s Wrong with “Banking the Unbanked”?

Microfinance vs. Financial Inclusion: What’s the Difference?

Courses featuring microfinance can be found in most colleges or universities, and the development of the syllabi for these courses has begun to create a sort of “microfinance canon.” As the next generation of microfinance professionals enters the market, there are a few things that many of them have read, and a few questions that many of them have been required to consider.

I took 10 syllabi (a small sample size, admittedly) and looked for trends in what is being taught, what is being read, and what is being assigned. Here are a few things I found:

• Students are reading Collins et al., Armendariz and Morduch, and Rhyne more than any other authors (Helms was a close fourth). These three authors represent a nice diversity of method and emphasis. Collins et al.’s Portfolios takes more of a client perspective, Armendariz and Morduch explain the more technical nuances, and Rhyne offers a more practical business approach.

• Guest speakers are a major part of class time. Given that microfinance is still very much practitioner (rather than academic) oriented, it is no surprise that guest speakers are used quite frequently in class time. Most, if not all, of these speakers are in top positions at well-known microfinance institutions.

• Assignments range from case study examples, to policy briefs, business plans, and product designs. In a few of the syllabi, students were required to make presentations, including one that assigned an investor pitch in lieu of a final exam.

Beyond these content-related observations, I noticed that microfinance classes don’t seem to have an agreed-upon disciplinary “home” in academia. Classes are typically hosted in business, economics, public policy, and international relations departments. In addition (and this is probably related), professors tend to not be tenure-track academics. Often, they are involved in microfinance as practitioners in some way.

Despite this lack of an academic “home” or identity, however, microfinance classes are increasingly common. A simple Google search brought up dozens of publicly available syllabi. Compared to the offerings as early as five or 10 years ago, this prevalence is quite encouraging.

To explore these syllabi for yourself, head to the following sources:

• Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government: Microfinance in Theory and Practice, taught by Guy Stuart

• New York University Stern School of Business: Building and Financing Microfinance Institutions and their Financial Products, taught by James B. Carlson

• Carnegie Mellon University Heinz School of Public Policy: Microfinance, taught by Tayo Fabusuyi

• University of Michigan: Introduction to Microfinance, taught by Michael Gordon

• Georgetown Public Policy Institute: Introduction to Microfinance for Development, taught by David Roodman

• Berkeley Haas School of Business: Introduction to Microfinance, taught by Sean Foote

• Denver University Josef Korbel School of International Studies: Microfinance and Sustainable Development, taught by Janney Carpenter

• Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: Microfinance and Development 1, taught by Elissa McCarter and Kate Druschel Griffin

• Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies: Microfinance and Development 2, taught by Victoria White and Isabelle Barres

Image credit: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Have you read?

5 Great Books About Microfinance and How the Poor Use Money

Center Advisory and Faculty Councils Meet in DC

Microfinance in Academia – The Center’s Faculty Council Reports on Their Activities