itpbooks

Basic Accounting for Credit and Savings Schemes
Nicola Elliott
Intended for readers without any formal accountancy training, this book explains in clear and simple language how to document the financial transactions associated with credit and savings schemes.
ISBN 0855983426, (Oxfam), 1996, 94pp, £5.95,

Cloning Grameen Bank: Replicating a poverty reduction model in India, Nepal and Vietnam
Edited by Helen Todd
Inspired by the enormous success of the Grameen Bank in providing financial assistance to the poorest of the poor, four individuals - a central banker, an appropriate-technology NGO organizer, a professor of international relations and a top-level communist official - each sought to replicate and adapt the model elsewhere in Asia. By giving an unvarnished account of the problems encountered in the crucial first years of establishing a credit programme, the book alerts potential microcredit practitioners to the pitfalls and obstacles likely to be encountered in setting up a programme. The book provides the opportunity to analyse the process of creating a successful credit programme and draws from the experience of these four projects some lessons in best practice.
ISBN 1853393908, (ITP), 1996, 126pp, £9.95,

A Critical Typology of Financial Services for the Poor: Working paper Number 1
Stuart Rutherford
This paper explores the range of indigenous systems of financial service provision for the poor and demonstrates the diverse and ingenious systems devised to enable poor people to better manage their finances. It highlights the need for practitioners, firstly to learn from financial services that already exist before designing new programmes, and secondly to innovate and experiment with a wider range of services beyond savings and credit.
ISBN 1872502407, (Actionaid), 1996, 52pp, £4.00,

Finance Against Poverty Volume 1
David Hulme and Paul Mosley
This book examines the theory that people can improve their living standards by becoming micro-entrepreneurs - and that financial institutions should support their initiative with small loans. Offering an in-depth analysis of the theory as well as policy recommendations for practitioners in the field, Volume 1 and Volume 2 are comprehensive studies of micro-finance to date.
ISBN 0415124298, (Routledge), 1996, 220pp, £16.99,

Finance Against Poverty Volume 2
David Hulme and Paul Mosley
Volume 2 assesses the provision of micro-credit as a effective policy instrument in the fight against poverty. Drawing on detailed data from seven developing countries, it is essential reading for all those interested in development, poverty-reduction, social welfare and finance.
ISBN 041512431X, (Routledge), 1996, 452pp, £19.99,

Micro-Credit: Impact, Targeting and Sustainability (IDS Bulletin Vol 29 No 4)


ISBN , (IDS Bulletins), 1998, , £10.95,

Microfinance and Poverty Reduction
Susan Johnson and Ben Rogaly
The provision of credit and other financial services has become increasingly seen as the answer to the problems facing poor people. This book considers various types of microfinance schemes and compares the effectiveness of different approaches in aiding poverty reduction.
ISBN 0855983698, (Oxfam), 1997, 144pp, £8.95,

The Microstart Guide: A guide for planning, starting and managing a microfinance program
UNDP
The MicroStart Guide offers a concrete methodology and ready-to-use tools for establishing a microfinance project. It offers existing or new economic and social service organizations a proven approach for meeting global demand for small loans to the smallest businesses. It can also be used by formal sector finance institutions interested in building outreach to this sector.
ISBN 9211260604, (UNDP PSDP), 1997, 228pp, £25.00,

The New Middlewomen: Profitable banking through on-lending groups
Malcolm Harper, Ezekiel Esipisu, A.K. Mohanty and D.S.K. Rao
The New Middlewomen describes a unique appraoch to the delivery of financial services to poor people, which can enable any existing commercial bank profitably to mobalize poor peopl'e savings and provide loans to them, without the need for special systems or new institutions. The book demonstrates how banks, alone or in collaboration with NGOs, can organize groups of people into `micro-banks' to reach a totally new and profitable market. These groups act as genuine independent banking intermediaries; they decide how much to save, who to lend to, for what purpose and at what rates of interest. Like any supplier of consumer goods or services, the banker can confidently and profitably delegate the final stage of the distribution task to a local intermediary. The New Middlewomen is the result of extensive research funded by teh British Department for International Development and the Ford Foundation in Kenya and INdia and will be essential reading for bankers who wish to support the poor profitably and effextively, and all those with an interest in micro-finance issues.
ISBN 1853394319, (ITP), 1998, 128pp, £12.95,

The New World of Microenterprise Finance: Building healthy financial institutions for the poor
Edited by Maria Otero and Elisabeth Rhyne
Argues that it is possible to create sustainable and viable financial institutions that give poor people greater access to financial services. Includes case studies of successful programmes from Asia, Africa and Latin America.
ISBN 1853392472, (ITP), 1994, 320pp, £17.50,

Our Money, Our Movement: Building a poor people's credit union
Alana Albee and Nandasiri Gamage
Credit and savings mechanisms are increasingly becoming a powerful tool in development, but many initiatives are only now aiming for the ownership of these mechanisms to be in the hands of the borrowers themselves. Our Money, Our Movement describes how this goal has already been reached by the Women's Credit Union in Sri Lanka. It challenges the more conventional 'delivery' approach to development by illustrating how financial services can be controlled and managed by the poor, rather than delivered to them, an approach which has long been a fundamental tenet of the credit union movement. This is essential and inspiring reading for development agency staff, and others either interested in people's movements or involved in credit and savings initiatives.
ISBN 1853393886, (ITP), 1996, 64pp, £7.95,

Partnership Financing for Small Enterprise: Some lessons from Islamic credit systems
Malcolm Harper
This book describes the experiences of a wide range of enterprises, banks and other agencies with partnership finance. Musharaka, or partnership financing, is a method used by Islamic financial institutions which reject the concept of fixed interest. It is, effectively, a much-simplified form of venture capital. It is generally recognized that small businesses and microenterprises can make effective use of institutional finance, and there is a wide range of methodologies through which such finance can be delivered to the owners of these enterprises, and recovered, in a way that is profitable for the businesses and self-sustaining for the financing institutions.
ISBN 1853393932, (ITP), 1997, 70pp, £14.95,

Profit for the Poor: Cases in micro-finance
Malcolm Harper
Micro-credit is the latest development fashion, and it has even received the ultimate accolade of a 'world summit'. It is not generally appreciated, however, that there is a wide variety of quite different approaches to the profitable delivery of financial services to the poor. Such services are being and, indeed, have for many years been provided by many different types of institutions, including traditional commercial banks, NGOs and the much publicized 'new generation' institutions. This book contains a selection of case studies from India, Bangladesh, East and Southern Africa, Indonesia and Latin America, together with many challenging comments and questions. Two points are made: first that there is no universally applicable methodology in the field, and second, that well-managed micro-finance can be profitable both for its customers and its providers; it is a business opportunity itself for bankers, and need not depend on donor assistance.
ISBN 1853394386, (ITP), 1998, 244pp, £12.95,

Rural Credit: Lessons for rural bankers and policymakers
K. P. Padmanabhan
What is - and what should be - the role of rural credit in developing countries? The author steers the reader though this discussion and towards sound practical conclusions, using examples from India, Brazil, Cameroon, Malawi and the Philippines.
ISBN 1853390208, (ITP), 1989, 138pp, £9.95,

Village Banking: The State of the Practice

By examining the state of the practice of village banking in Latin America, Africa and Asia, this paper is an initial step in charting the future of a movement whose mission is to eliminate poverty - which is growing faster than the programmes to combat it. Village banking programmes need to determine how to get from their current status of thousands of banks serving thousands of members to a point ten years hence when banks and their members count in the millions. This paper begins with a summary of village banking's historical evolution, it then examines the village banking methodology in detail, and goes on to discuss how the predominance of women members (95%) influences the application of and impact upon new models of village banking.
ISBN 0912917393, (UNIFEM), 1996, 80pp, £9.75,

Where Credit is Due: Income-generating programmes in developing countries
Joe Remenyi
Development economics reveal that thousands of poor `microentrepreneurs' are able to work, invest, and overcome poverty when given the chance; the author looks to the use of credit-based income generation schemes as a new poverty-alleviation strategy.
ISBN 1853390798, (ITP), 1991, 144pp, £9.95,

Who Needs Credit?: Poverty and finance in Bangladesh
Edited by Geoffrey D.Wood and Iffath A.Sharif
Micro-credit, the loan of small sums to people excluded from normal banking processes, has emerged in recent years as an important and growing issue in Development Policy. Combining the work of both academics and NGO practitioners Who Needs Credit? argues that there are very real dangers involved in uncritically adopting micro-credit strategies as a universal and cheap panacea for poverty. While centred on the experience of Bangladesh, it brings forward questions that arise for any NGO in any country that attempts to repeat the Bangladeshi experiment.
ISBN 1856495248, (Zed Books), 1997, 396pp, £16.95,