Sometimes when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Thomas Dichter has a critique of the overhype of microcredit. Picked up via BoingBoing and Futurismic.
Yet microcredit is an almost perfect case of a phenomenon that has come
to characterize much of development assistance – a widening gap between
reality and propaganda. For while the promise of microcredit is
irresistible – help the poor out of poverty using their own
entrepreneurial energies, and in the process get our investment back –
the hoped for poverty reduction impact of microcredit remains elusive.