There is growing evidence that appropriate financial services have substantial benefits for
consumers, especially women and poor adults. This paper provides an overview of financial …

Many people in Low-and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) work for Small and Medium-
sized Enterprises (SMEs). Oftentimes, these SMEs have limited access to finance …

Although theory suggests that financial market imperfections–mainly information
asymmetries, market segmentation and transaction costs–prevent poor people from …

Mobile money, a service that allows monetary value to be stored on a mobile phone and
sent to other users via text messages, has been adopted by the vast majority of Kenyan …

Despite evidence from multiple randomized evaluations of microcredit, questions about
external validity have impeded consensus on the results. I jointly estimate the average effect …

INTRODUCTION Working in six countries with an international consortium, we investigate
whether a multifaceted Graduation program can help the extreme poor establish sustainable …

We report results from a randomized evaluation of a microcredit program introduced in rural
areas of Morocco in 2006. Thirteen percent of the households in treatment villages took a …

We use a clustered randomized trial, and over 16,000 household surveys, to estimate
impacts at the community level from a group lending expansion at 110 percent APR by the …

This paper reports results from the randomized evaluation of a group-lending microcredit
program in Hyderabad, India. A lender worked in 52 randomly selected neighborhoods …

Savings-led microfinance programs operate in poor rural communities in developing
countries to establish groups that save and then lend out the accumulated savings to each …