Serving the poorest of the poor: The poverty impact of the Khushhali bank’s Microfinance lending in Pakistan

This post is also available in: Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)

Introduction

Although Pakistan’s economy enjoyed relatively stable growth during the 1990s poverty and income inequality continued to rise; the most recent official estimates are that roughly one-third the population was below the poverty line at the start of the millennium. In response to these widely cited figures, the government of Pakistan establish poverty reduction as its overarching objective and recognizing the potential role of microfinance in alleviating poverty, embarked on a Microfinance Sector Development Program (MSDP) to broaden and deepen the microfinance sector to provide a broad range of financial services in a sustainable manner.