Microfinance Institutions (MFIs) are used to claim that their impact goes beyond money since rescuing from exclusion uncollateralized poor borrowers significantly affects their dignity, self-esteem, social recognition, future economic perspectives and, through it, life satisfaction. Our article...

Traditional banks have proved to have severe limits in mitigating financial exclusion. The microfinance revolution is intended to address this problem by devising new approaches which ease credit access for poor and uncollateralized borrowers. In this introductory essay we present a special...