More than three billion people live in poverty around the world, but millions are managing to raise their living standards to some degree, thanks to microfinance. Even so, there’s plenty of scope for scaling up the current model of microlending to help others.
Organisations like ACCION were willing to hedge their bets on the poor as far back as the 1970s -- and today microfinance is flourishing in Asia especially, with around 49 million borrowers.
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Stanley Kwok |
“We are product-neutral, gender-neutral,” says Stanley Kwok, ACCION’s Chief Executive Officer, who took part recently in an Asia Society talk in Hong Kong called ‘Microfinance in Asia: What lies in store?’
As one of the pioneers of microfinancing, Kwok reveals it wasn’t easy for ACCION in the early days. “It took us 12 years to figure out microfinance was going to help people and in 1973, we made our first microloan.”
To read the full, original article click on this link: Social innovation, microfinance, Asia
Author: Karen Cho
