Low-income households find it hard to cope with the risks brought about by an illness or injury, death of a family member, man-made calamities, and natural disasters. Demand for microinsurance products is growing and both formal and informal microinsurance schemes have started to emerge to...

This study assesses the state of microinsurance in the country, identifies the players and their performance, and the challenges facing microinsurance development. The term micro pertains to the capacity of a program to handle the small, sometime irregular cash flows of poor households, who have...

Establishing financially inclusive ecosystems for low-income clients, including small and medium enterprises, has become a rising global concern. The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor and the World Bank estimate that around 2.7 billion adults worldwide do not have access to credit,...

Using data from a quick survey of various rural (RFIs) and microfinance institutions (MFIs) in East Asia, the paper tries to find out how those institutions and their clientele have been affected by the global financial crisis, how they have coped with the ongoing crisis, and what they plan to...

Microfinance is an emerging important financial subsector in Asian transition countries. Its role is to improve financial access of the poor and small economic players and thus help them to build assets, thereby contribute to poverty alleviation. This paper provides an overview of rural finance...