Best practice of Banking with the poor

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INTRODUCTION

This report reviews the experience of banking with the poor, primarily among the members of the Banking with the Poor Network, but also drawing upon the variety of experience in the Asia-Pacific region. The report is concerned chiefly with the four years since the Network was created at the first regional workshop on Banking with the Poor in Manila in May 1991. The ideas that the poorest of the poor could be enabled to help themselves by securing access to credit to finance their productive activities, and that this credit should be supplied from commercial sources in a sustainable fashion rather than being treated as a redistributive or social welfare exercise, seemed more novel at that time than they do now.

The purpose of this report is to review the experience of implementing banking with the poor. The intention is to focus on ‘best practice’ in methods of instituting, operating and sustaining linkages designed to assure a commercially sustainable flow of credit to the poor, from the viewpoint of the major ‘actors’ capable of playing a role in this process. After reviewing the experience of implementation, the report comes to certain conclusions about the elements of best practice in banking with the poor.