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April, apparently, is the Month of Microfinance. Prof. Shawn Humphrey, the initiator of the Month (also blogger and passionate educator), kindly allowed me to contribute a provocative analysis of the microfinance sector as serving the interests of the rich, not the poor: financialising poverty. My objective isn’t to provoke people so much as their thoughts – let’s see what happens. The Month of Microfinance is primarily aimed at students; I hope for anything other than complete silence or dogmatic indignation, and an interesting discussion.
(phil)
Last week at the International Studies Association Conference in Toronto, Marie Langevin (Ottawa) and I hosted a panel bringing together Northern and Southern perspectives on what may be termed poverty finance*. These perspectives surprisingly only rarely speak to each other, and our panel demonstrated how important and fruitful such a conversation is. Phil Cerny chaired the panel “Fringe Finance and Financial Inclusion”, and Rob Aitken (Alberta) – one of the few exceptional researchers whose work spans both the worlds of Northern and Southern poverty finance – acted as discussant of the papers.
The papers…