You’d be forgiven for thinking microfinance has gone wildly out of fashion. The “development caravan”—defined as the wagon train of poverty interventions that excite donors—has pulled away from micro-lending, drawn to more powerful things like BRAC-style
graduation programmes (which aim to “graduate” people from extreme poverty into a sustainable livelihood) and
bKash-like mobile money, according to recent
coverage in
The Economist.