Microfinance phần 3 ppsx

1.8 Conclusion

What future awaits microfinance? There is no correct answer to this

question. Practitioners and researchers should ask the question in

another way: what kind of future does microfinance deserve? Indeed,

because those who devote their physical and intellectual energies to

microfinance every day have the possibility, and the duty, to steer its

future development.

Microcredit has been able to bring a dignity and integrity to the fight

against extreme poverty that, in the past, the different types of support

to the poor were unable to do. The positive performance of microcredit

programmes has allowed sustainable actions over time, capable of set￾ting in motion worthwhile processes over and above single financial

activities.

In recent years, microfinance has taken over from the concept of

microcredit. The fight against extreme poverty has become part of a

wider objective in the fight against financial exclusion. The beneficiaries

of support are no longer only poor people in developing countries. The

offer of products foresees other financial services and technical assistance,

as well as microcredit. Together with donors and non-profit institutions,

other microfinance institutions and traditional financial intermediaries

are present on the market.

Modern microfinance therefore offers more alternatives compared

with the past experience of microcredit: it is able to achieve a wider

potential number of beneficiaries; it is able to suit the interventions to

the effective needs and characteristics of the clients and of the selected

intervention areas; and it is able to offer a more structured financial and

technical assistance.

Is everything all right, then? The changes that have taken place

impose the following two rules: not to diminish the positive, traditional

character of microcredit; to limit the risks that financial innovation

brings along with it. New customers, new products, new intermediaries:

this line of development of microfinance generates more complicated

financial structures than those used in the past for microcredit, new

systems of evaluation and control of processes and institutions, new

criteria for the objectives of performance and sustainability.

In the face of an enhanced financial sophistication, greater trans￾parency and a more efficient management system, microfinance risks

losing its real nature of immediacy and ethicality that mark its origins.

Encouraging the development of microfinance, today, means especially,

finding operational and managerial models able to yield balanced

18 Microfinance