Microfinance Industry in Asia-current Status, Recent Trends and Some Thoughts on the Future

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Fernando, Nimal A.
Copyright Year	2000
Abstract	1. Close to 900 million of the world’s poor – those who survive on less than $1 a day – live in the Asian and Pacific region. Most of the region’s poor or more than 670 million people (about 135 million households), live in rural areas, although urban poverty is also a growing problem in virtually all countries in the region. Most rural people are engaged in agricultural activities as laborers or small-scale farmers. Many are also involved in a variety of microenterprises to supplement their meager and volatile incomes from other sources. Urban poor are engaged in a variety of nonfarm activities including petty trading. These poor households have few assets other than their labor, and they have little access to formal financial services such as savings, credit and insurance. Many of them rely on self-finance, informal sources or combinations of these two to meet their demand for financial services. Self-finance has obvious limitations. The informal sources are also limited in their capacity to fully meet this demand efficiently. It is in this context that the current status and the future of the microfinance industry in the Asian and Pacific region will be discussed in this presentation.
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
Alternate Webpage(s)	http://www.microfinancegateway.org/sites/default/files/mfg-en-paper-microfinance-industry-in-asia-current-status-recent-trends-and-some-thoughts-on-the-future-2000.pdf
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article