The Great Debate UK
from The Great Debate:
Stop conflating microfinance and entrepreneurship
Bogota, Colombia – Although the phone rings incessantly, Carlos Moreno is not distracted. He continues to talk, not just about his life as a slightly graying 78-year-old pastor but also about how he became what some consider to be the world’s first microfinance recipient. It wasn’t as an entrepreneur.
“My life is dedicated to the Lord,” he says. Although Carlos had launched a tea and spice business in the early 1970s, he hadn’t aspired to be an entrepreneur. That is the case with most microfinance recipients. Yet the movement that extends small, uncollateralized loans to the poor to start businesses has marketed itself as being about entrepreneurship. That is a mistake. While microfinance may have helped Carlos start a business, it did not make him an entrepreneur.
Carlos’s dream was to build a Protestant ministry. To get there, he took out a loan in 1971 from the Institute for International Development Inc (IIDI), the precursor to Opportunity International, a Chicago-based microfinance institution. That transaction appears to be the first loan in modern microfinance history, though as Center for Global Development Senior Fellow David Roodman notes, “people have been making small loans to help the poor for 500 years.”
Opportunity International was one of the first organizations to experiment with making financial services available to the poor to help them launch enterprises. Accion International began making loans in Latin America in 1973. Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus perfected the model and succeeded in scaling up the movement with the launch of the Grameen Bank in 1976. All inspired millions to rally behind entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs needed if the UK is going to make up the deficit
-Joe White is managing director of Moonfruit.com. The opinions expressed are his own. Join Reuters for a live discussion with guests as UK Chancellor George Osborne makes an emergency budget statement at 12:30 p.m. British time on Tuesday, June 22, 2010.-
The first Tory budget is a critical one. The Treasury and Chancellor George Osborne have been dropping hints for weeks about a big slash in public sector spending in an effort to try and prepare Whitehall for the worst, and to rally the private sector to step in and fill the deficit.
Budget not as generous as it first appears
-Julie Meyer is CEO of Ariadne Capital, a technology investment and advisory firm backing entrepreneurs in media, moble Internet and communications. The opinions expressed are her own.-
I recently spoke at an IBM event alongside former chancellor Norman Lamont about the issues that face entrepreneurs and how we can turbo-charge these value creators to help rebuild the country’s wealth.
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