British FCO Minister for Africa Mark Malloch Brown described it thus.

"Microfinance is much more than simply an income generation tool. By directly empowering poor people, particularly women, it has become one of the key driving mechanisms towards meeting the Millennium Development Goals, specifically the overarching target of halving extreme poverty and hunger by 2015."

Advances in global communication and particularly telephony and the internet are every day making our world much smaller than that of a generation ago. At the same time however, the gap between the rich and the poor is growing in its extremity. A woman in the developing world or a war-torn country, Sudan, Somalia, DRC, has vastly different aspirations than the one in the developed world( the United Kingdom for example). While both want to advance the quality of life for their families, the social and economic infrastructure levels of where they live is immeasurably different and even with their best efforts, the results are pre-ordained to be worlds apart.

nothing to bank on

In Kenya, which is at an economic and political cross-roads, Wanjiku Murage, a middle-aged widow peasant in Rombo irrigation scheme in Loitokitok district (formerly a division of Kajiado district), sees her economic prospects as very dim. She has no land of her own and is forced instead to lease a quarter of an acre of land from the pastoralists Maasai, with no land tenure she is faced with the constant fear of losing the land, especially when ethnic tensions rise to coincide with the election campaigns. The poor state of the roads make it impossible to transport her harvest to the market. Revenue from the produce barely covers the cost of leasing the land and food for her family. She is unable to move above subsistence level even though her dreams include university education for her children. As she has no assets ,not a house nor a plot of land, no bank is willing to lend to her.

According to Frank Griffiths, the CEO of Fina bank, economic development will only come to pass in the region, when the local small family businesses are nurtured through provision of credit at low interest rates. He adds that the "lack of SMEs or the 'missing middle' has retarded the growth of African economies. Microcredit ameliorates economic and social exclusion, diminishes the vulnerability of poor population and reduces poverty.' For any lasting success to be achieved, the poor have to be taught to liberate themselves from perpetual servitude, they must be nurtured to self-reliance and eventually handed the skills needed to graduate into the mainstream financial markets.

In Bolivia, a successful micro-finance industry has led to loan clients doubling their income in two years. They were also more likely than the rest of the indigent population to access health care and send their children to school. The most successful is the pasanaku. According to Christian Galido who reports on pasanakus; "The pasanaku is a circle which seeks the development of the group via the use of social capital, trust, social control, and the establishment of social relationships and solidarity."

tomorrow's peasants or liberated farmers

For Micro-Credit to work well in a developing economy a framework must exist that puts the social worth of a micro-finance organization in terms of its depth, worth to users, cost to users, availability, longevity, and scope of output in place. It is not enough to dangle opportunities before people today, only to withdraw them the next.

Micro Finance Institutions must also put strong pressure on governments to provide adequate education, because a highly trained workforce comprising indigenous and female representation will be essential for the community-wide benefit of all parties involved. Institutions can also begin gathering ethnographic information about their clients on a very basic level to simply know who they are serving, what percentages prefer what languages, and so on. MFIs' lack of internal demographic and cultural statistics only reinforces their shift towards Western corporate models that have proven extremely controversial in the developing world. The more initiative MFIs show in the pursuit of cultural understanding and adaptation, the more likely their own clients will be to develop pride in themselves based on their culture not just their income.