Using Islamic microfinance to alleviate poverty
Poverty alleviation has traditionally been the domain of the interest-based development agency and profit generation has always been the mainstay of the corporation. Rarely have the two overlapped: corporate shareholders have no interest in giving money away and development banks have little to offer profit-oriented investors. Until microfinance. For perhaps the first time in economic development history the poor are seen as potentially profitable.
Microfinance is a financing tool that sustainably provides very small loans to the working poor. A handful of borrowers, usually 5 to 20 individuals, assemble themselves into groups. The first set of loans are extended to an initial subset of individuals within the group, for instance 2 out of the group’s 5 individuals, and once these loans are repaid, a second subset of individuals receive their loans. This continues through the entire group, circulating until a final loan is extended to a designated group leader.
Variations of this general theme abound but the basic underlying principle remains the same: a borrower is much more likely to repay on time if not doing so affects one’s selected group partner, usually an acquaintance. The fear of a faceless bank is replaced with the mercy for one’s own neighbor. This non-traditional concept of “social collateral” banking allows the poor to break out of the poverty cycle: the provision of capital allows for greater business investment, which leads to increased income,resulting in higher household savings and eventual financial independence.
THE ORIGINS OF CONVENTIONAL MICROFINANCE
Microfinance grew out of the failure of cooperative movements and government-sponsored initiatives for concessional individual lending. With some of these heavily subsidized programs yielding repayment rates as low as 40%, there is little wonder they were short-lived. 소액결제현금화
In the1970s, Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank revolutionized the development world by extending small, interest-based loans to the extreme poor, an economic group commercial banks refused to lend to and development banks found difficult to sustain acceptable repayment rates with. But by assembling individuals into self-selected borrowing groups, particularly in homogeneous settings, peer pressure and peer assistance lead to a form of informal monitoring that paved the way for continued success.
What began as a $26 loan to 42 village women is now a major industry in Bangladesh, with 4 million Grameen borrowers and over $4 billion in disbursed loans, of which over $300 million is currently outstanding. All collateral-free.
… ITS PROBLEMS…
But critics of Grameen and other conventional micro financiers cite Draconian interest rate levels as a major impediment to many borrowers becoming truly self-sufficient; an astronomical 22% interest rate charge at Grameen (measured on a declining basis), and as high as 50% elsewhere. Anathema to Muslims, for whom taking even the smallest amount of interest is forbidden, evidenced by a number of Qur’anic verses (2:275-279, 3:130, 4:160-161, 30:39), numerous rigorously authentic traditions of the Prophet, may God bless him and give him peace, the consensus of the four schools of jurisprudence, and the ravaging effects of decades of low-interest development loans to poor countries.
The single biggest problem with conventional microfinance, and for that matter all interest-based finance, is that the borrower has to make his interest payments even if he is unable to meet them. If his business succeeds, he pays; if his business fails, he still pays.