Does microcredit reduce rich-poor gap?
by Jeremy Seabrook ONE of the fastest-growing aspects of development in recent years has been microcredit. This has become so universal that it has been hailed as the answer to poverty, a panacea for underdevelopment. It has everything: empowerment, participation, upliftment. And what is more, poor people who cannot get access to credit through banks are proving themselves far more reliable than big corporate borrowers in paying back what they owe. The success of microcredit depends upon acceptance of a reality which, until recently, no one seriously believed that the poor are more honest than the rich, that they take their debts seriously and do not shirk from paying them. In the early 1980s, the success of Ela Bhatt s SEWA in Ahmedabad, which made loans to very poor women, became a model of small-scale credit. Later, Dr Muhammad Yunnus Grameen Bank became the standard-bearer of microcredit on a wider scale. Today, there is scarcely any self-respecting non-government organisation that
