Microcredit has emerged as a hugely popular tool all over the developing world
for helping poor people to help themselves by engaging in self-employed
income-earning activities. By developing innovative ways of providing the poor
with access to credit, the microcredit revolution, as it has come to be called,
has seriously challenged many traditional assumptions about both poverty
reduction strategies and financial markets. While this has encouraged new
theorising about how microcredit works, the evolution of the practice of
microcredit has outpaced the development of theory.
This book aims to remedy this imbalance, arguing that a proper understanding of
the evolution of practice is essential both for developing