Using Credit Unions as Conduits for Microenterprise Lending: Latin-American Insights

This paper assesses the performance of different types of financial service suppliers frequently encountered in the informal sector:

• Lending-investors;
• Pawnshops;
• Cooperatives;
• Support NGOs.

The assessment focuses in particular on two aspects:

• The institutional capacity to reach a large number of low-income clients with very limited resources;
• The capacity to manage these resources efficiently, reflected, for example, in positive real interest rates, high repayment rates and local refinancing arrangements.

[Adapted from author]