Microfinance has never received as much attention from as many diverse sources as it has in this past month.
The 2006 Nobel Peace Prize to Professor Muhammad Yunus and Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank is the highest and the most prestigious honour received by the microfinance community to date. Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank deserve overwhelming congratulations for having been the face of microfinance for decades and spread the message far and wide that access to credit should be a human right.
While Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank were the official recipients of the award, the positive recognition has rippled across the entire microfinance industry. This award is a great recognition of the important work done by hundreds of thousands of people the world over to bring financial opportunity to millions of poor people.
Furthermore, by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize the Nobel Committee has also ignited a debate in the wider global community about the nature and relationship of financial services to peace and prosperity. However, as microfinance found its way into the editorial pages of The Economist and the New York Times it did so in less flattering light than would be expected from those more familiar with microfinance and its potential.
The Economist was chiefly concerned that the Nobel Peace Prize has lost its “lustre” and is simply being given to individuals who are worthy of praise, if not specifically praise for creating a more peaceful world. The newspaper urged the Nobel committee to withhold the prize for a few years so that the purpose of the prize is not confused or diluted. While The Economist should be lauded for its bravery in suggesting that the prize be given to the deserving or withheld, the editors seem to have such a narrow interpretation of peace that they missed the fact that poverty is perhaps the greatest cause for violence. Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank are deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize because peace is the fruit that is borne from improving human lives and increasing their self respect and hope for the future. While one cannot say that microfinance directly leads to a more stable and therefore peaceful society, by awarding the prize to Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank, the Nobel committee showed that resolving active conflicts is only one kind of peacemaking. Today’s wars, whether characterized as clashes of civilizations or struggles for land or self determination, have a poverty of opportunity, capital, self respect, and hope at their core. Microfinance addresses this poverty before it is exploited to instigate people to take up arms.
The more debateable critique came from the pages of the New York Times in which John Tierney argued that Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, had done more to encourage development than Professor Yunus, based on the number of manufacturing jobs Wal-Mart stimulates in developing countries. He argued that for many people in developing economies, a manufacturing job that takes them out of the field or away from a micro-enterprise provides an increase in income and living standards that microfinance is not able to achieve. While more analysis on the claim that manufacturing jobs create a step-function increase in income that microfinance cannot match is surely due, at its root, Tierney’s commentary is concerned with microfinance’s chief limitation: achieving scale. Wal-Mart is quickly becoming the world’s largest retailer of goods and services. It has mushroomed from a small regional store into a massive corporation that has no true retail equal in terms of geographic reach, market capitalization, or the polarization of public opinion. Microfinance institutions could indeed learn from the best of Wal-Mart’s ability to scale and serve millions of customers across 15 countries.
These are just two examples of the kind of attention microfinance has generated in the past few weeks. The increased press coverage and discovery of microfinance the world over will increase MFIs access to capital from diverse sources including a larger percentage of governmental international development budgets, NGOs, and social investment funds. This increase in funding comes with an increase in pressure for further and more rapid capacity building on the ground. Innovative, mainstream solutions focused on adapting lessons from leading businesses in all sectors should be applied to microfinance to both help absorb the increased funding and the need to rapidly reach greater scale. As part of these efforts, it is also crucial that MFIs’ governance structures and processes are either put in place or refined so that they can both absorb additional capital and accelerate their outreach efforts. As many observers have stated, if scale can be efficiently and quickly reached then the next time microfinance is considered for a Nobel it will be for the prize in economics.
