Oxfam micro-loans

[fivemack]

From some junk mail they've just sent me, it appears that Oxfam are going into the micro-credit business; they want me to help capitalise them so that they can make £25 loans to create small businesses in (initially) Sudan and the tsunami-struck bits of Sri Lanka.

I recall rezendi's fulminations about the aid industry in general; the bits of the third world I've been to are clearly not in as much a mess as Sudan or Sri Lanka, but the impression I had is that what they lacked was in fact capital, and this seems to me a reasonably sensible way to provide it.

But there are those reading who know more about aid than I; is there some nasty catch here? Less-than-entirely-ethical investments (Russian oil in particular) have been remarkably good to me over the last year, and to have Lukoil, Rio Tinto Limited, PetroChinaCo and Walmart-de-Mexico pay to capitalise roti-makers in Batticaloa Province seems somehow appropriate.

Comments

[redbird]

Or cell phones--one of the successes of the micro-lending stuff has been lending women in rural India money for mobile phones, one to a village. The women then sell time to their neighbors who can call relatives who have moved to the big city--whether Delhi or London--or check prices for their agricultural products. The women have a nice little business, and the village as a whole benefits.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Maybe when the mobile phones were more expensive a few years ago? I hear that these days almost everyone in India and Africa now have mobile phones, especially in rural areas.

[rezendi.livejournal.com]

If you got that from me, then I misspoke/was unclear - almost anyone within walking distance of a town has access to mobile phone service, but phones themselves are only owned by the relatively well off. In a smallish remote town in Africa, pop. 1000, surrounding walking-distance rural pop. 10000, you'd probably have two or three mobile-phone stands and a few hundred people with phones of their own. Better reach in big cities: in, say, Kampala, maybe a third of the people you walk past in the downtown might have phones. (Much fewer in the surrounding shantytowns.)

India's much more complicated. There are over fifty million mobiles there (judging from this), but that is from a population of a billion.