Community-Based Enabling Models of Microfinance: Praxis and Lessons from India

H.S. Shylendra
Additional contact information
H.S. Shylendra: Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA), Anand, Gujarat, India. Email: hss@irma.ac.in

Millennial Asia, 2012, vol. 3, issue 2, 139-168

Abstract: Microfinance, having emerged as a widespread phenomenon, is commonly dominated by the approach advocating undue financial and commercial orientation. Microfinance interventions following such an approach have come under severe scrutiny due to a series of crises encountered by them. This paper is an attempt in the direction of guiding the debate over microfinance in a more meaningful way by capturing the experience of interventions based on alternative approaches, especially focusing on community based enabling models. The enabling models emphasise on creating collectives whereby members can exercise control and ownership providing apparently several advantages. By bringing community issues to the fore they help resolve many of the contradictions that go with the delivery of microfinance. The experience, however, shows that enabling models are faced with several challenges in realising their full potential be it in terms of their form, outreach or depth of services or ability to tap developmental links for creating holistic impact. The paper identifies policy implications for strengthening the enabling models like creating suitable legal framework for community based structures, ensuring resource support for the process of social intermediation and capacity building, providing adequate and cheaper public funds for meeting their loan fund needs, and boosting the linkages between microfinance and other developmental programmes.

Keywords: Microfinance; Public funds; Community oriented enabling models; capacity building; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/097639961200300202 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:millen:v:3:y:2012:i:2:p:139-168

DOI: 10.1177/097639961200300202

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Millennial Asia
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().