Microfinance’s Success Sets Off a Debate in Mexico
- April 07
- D&S BLOG
From Saturday’s New York Times:
Microfinance’s Success Sets Off a Debate in Mexico
By ELISABETH MALKIN
Published: April 5, 2008VILLA DE VÁZQUEZ, Mexico — Carlos Danel and Carlos Labarthe turned a nonprofit that lent money to Mexico’s poor into one of the country’s most profitable banks.
But not all of their colleagues in the world of microlending — so named for the tiny loans it grants — are heaping praise on the co-executives of Compartamos. Some are vilifying them as “pawnbrokers” and “money lenders.”
They are the center of a fractious debate: how far should microfinance go toward becoming big business? Read more.
For a critique of microcredit, see Microcredit and Women’s Poverty, by economists Susan Feiner and Drucilla Barker. The article was included in a volume edited by Farooque Chowdhury, Microcredit: Myth Manufactured (with a preface by Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer).
