Your inflexible friend
Microlending is booming once again. If it is to help people out of poverty, though, it needs to work much better
ON A shelf in Buland Iqbal’s tiny roadside shop, cassette tapes are slowly turning pale in the sun. Nobody wants them these days, even in a dusty suburb in one of India’s poorest states. So Mr Iqbal has branched out. First he moved into renting DVDs, then, more boldly, into pay-television. A loan of 31,000 rupees ($465) from Sonata, a microfinance firm, helped him acquire a few satellite dishes and decoder boxes. It seems like a clear-cut success for microlending. In fact, Mr Iqbal’s loan illustrates why microlending does not work all that well, and how it needs to change.
This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline “Your inflexible friend”
International October 8th 2016
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