What is Microcredit?
Prof. Dr. Muhammad Yunus
September, 2004
The word "microcredit" did not exist before the seventies. Now it has become a buzz-word among the development practitioners. In the process, the word has been imputed to mean everything to everybody. No one now gets shocked if somebody uses the term "microcredit" to mean agricultural credit, or rural credit, or cooperative credit, or consumer credit, credit from the savings and loan associations, or from credit unions, or from money lenders. When someone claims microcredit has a thousand year history, or a hundred year history, nobody finds it as an exciting piece of historical information.
I think this is creating a lot of misunderstanding and confusion in the discussion about microcredit. We really don't know who is talking about what. I am proposing that we put labels to various types of microcredit so that we can clarify at the beginning of our discussion which microcredit we are talking about. This is very important for arriving at clear conclusions, formulating right policies, designing appropriate institutions and methodologies. Instead of just saying "microcredit" we should specify which category of microcredit.
Let me suggest a broad classification of microcredit:
A) Traditional informal microcredit (such as, moneylender's credit, pawn shops, loans from friends and relatives, consumer credit in informal market, etc.)
B) Microcredit based on traditional informal groups (such as, tontin, su su, ROSCA, etc.)
C) Activity-based microcredit through conventional or specialised banks (such as, agricultural credit, livestock credit, fisheries credit, handloom credit, etc.)
D) Rural credit through specialised banks.
E) Cooperative microcredit (cooperative credit, cred ...