Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Loans for women aren't always used by women

The most obvious trade off between a for-profit microfinance model and the NGO model can be seen directly in the picture below. Speaking in ideal terms, an NGO model would always be motivated by the social impact of every loan and therefore hand out the money where it is most needed. A for-profit model, on the other hand, being a money churning machine pushed by volumes will attempt to reach out to the largest number of reliable clients it can. The social impact in the latter's case is almost always incidental and never the primary motive.

The women of the house took out loans from Sahayata in order to enable this family business to expand

Even though Sahayata's loans are given out strictly to women, the loan (mostly in cases of joint families which run a single business) is actually used up by the elders or the men of the house for the family business. One of the down sides of a for profit model is exactly this - no premium is ever actually placed on empowering the woman, the priority lies in collecting back the loan with interest. Of course its hard to argue that the family (and consequentially the woman herself) didn't benefit from the loan given out.

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