microfinance

noun

mi·​cro·​fi·​nance ˌmī-krō-ˈfī-ˌnan(t)s 

-fə-ˈnan(t)s,

-fī-ˈnan(t)s

: financial services especially in the form of microloans provided to impoverished individuals and groups in poor and developing regions

Muhammad Yunus starts lending money to the rural poor in Bangladesh. His Grameen Bank kicks off a worldwide movement in microfinance as lenders start to see poor people, especially women, not as bad credit risks but as profitable customers.

—Barbara Kiviat

Examples of microfinance in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web

Hezbollah developed a powerful if opaque network of social support organizations and even a microfinance lender, finding ways to ensure its supporters retained some financial stability even as the entire Lebanese economy around them collapsed in 2019. —Ruth Michaelson / Beirut, TIME, 4 Oct. 2024

The basic concept of PCM is not new: Financial institutions have used a similar process in commercial real estate portfolios, and microfinance institutions have experimented with a similar idea. —Olivia White michael Wiegand, Harvard Business Review, 26 Sep. 2024

Back in college, my classmates had high-minded ambitions like fighting climate change, becoming human-rights lawyers, and starting microfinance firms to alleviate poverty. —Manvir Singh, The New Yorker, 9 Sep. 2024

But extensive research in many countries over long periods has shown that microfinance is not a particularly powerful intervention, as these things go. —Bjorn Lomborg, Foreign Affairs, 15 Aug. 2017

Word History

First Known Use

1994, in the meaning defined above