Nirantara Community Services, Arohan, and Sanghamithra Rural Financial Services have been announced winners of Royal Bank of Scotland and PlaNet Finance’s India’s Microfinance Process Excellence Awards .

They were the third annual awards and the winners for the awards were selected from a

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One of the most recognizable names in Indian microfinance has decided to step down from his role as CEO. Vikram Akula, the visionary founder and leader of SKS Microfinance will step down.

Mr. Akula says that this change will allow

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Editor’s Note: Aparna Dalal works with the Financial Access Initiative, a research consortium between New York University, Harvard, Yale, and Innovations for Poverty Action. FAI is focused on finding answers to how financial services can better meet the needs of…

Madura Micro Finance has received an investment by Unitus Equity Fund to ramp up their offerings to women self help groups (SHGs) in rural India.

Madura Micro Finance will use UEF’s funding to increase its management bandwidth and institutional capacity

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Last night I had the good fortune of sitting in on a talk given by Nancy Barry, a pioneer in the field of creating private, market-based solutions to poverty alleviation for women across the globe. Her talk was very powerful…

According to Mr Chu, “to roll back poverty rather than to merely alleviate it”, any solution needs to be able to reach massive numbers, deliver permanent results that can help many generations, provide continuous effort so it gets better and

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PepsiCo Foundation has awarded two grants, totaling $76 million, to sustainable water and sanitation efforts by WaterPartners and Safe Water Network. The PR release describes each program. WaterPartners will use the award to implement their…

The global credit crunch has led to a significant drop in fund flow to the microfinance sector. Banks, which are required to provide 32-40 percent of their loans to the priority sector (which includes rural credit), are the largest providers

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Here are two stories from Microcapital.org:

• Michael & Susan Dell Foundation (MSDF) and Lok Capital LLC have decided to jointly invest $1.5 million in Arohan Financial Services Ltd., a MFI located in Kolkata.

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So, it looks as though many smaller MFIs will now become absorbed by the larger players as the microfinance sector is expected to enter into period of substantial consolidation within India. According to Microcapital.org,

The sector, which has

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