A Study on “SAMURDHI MICRO LOANS” and Its Impact on Alleviating Rural Poverty
A case study based on “Samurdhi Micro Loans” in Biyagama divisional Secretary Area in Gampaha district
1. Introduction
Poverty is a big problem in developing countries. Sri Lanka as a middle income country is also facing the problem of poverty. A lot of families in Sri Lanka are being covered under the safety net programs funded by the government of Sri Lanka in terms of income transfer (food and income subsidy), nutrition package for pregnant and lactating mothers and milk feeding subsidy for children between two and five years old. Therefore, one of the main responsibilities of the government of Sri Lanka is to eradicate poverty from our mother land.
"Samurdhi"
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The samurdhi banks were launched in order to provide financial facilities to the poor and to empower the small scale entrepreneurs. It is the responsibility of samurdhi officers to converse the lives of the poor in to business based high percentage self financing life. Currently there are 4 samurdhi banks representing 1022 bank societies in Biyagama …show more content…
Typically, they have fixed workshop and capital investments but the character is still small and most of the production is meant for local markets. It is important to note that the number of employees is not the only measure of the size of micro credit enterprises. Other factors such as output, sales and asset levels may be equally appropriate indicators of the size of the firm’s operation. Currently, most of the loans to micro-entrepreneurs are provided primarily through the government, foreign aid assisted non-governmental agencies or informal money lenders. Financial institutions must recover their cost of servicing loans by interest charges and they must be confident borrower’s intent ability to repay. Financial institutions are also hampered by lack of formal collateral. This means the standard criteria used by the financial institutions are inappropriate for micro enterprise lending. To over-come this problem the government established a channel to direct their own programs with the objective of achieving social welfare and micro enterprise development. The Samurdhi Development Credit Scheme developed by the Ministry of Nation Building in Sri Lanka. This scheme was intended to serve the rural community through village level task forces called “Samurdhi Task Forces” which operated as a social intermediary. The task force used its members called “Samurdhi Development Officer” to select recipients of the
This case is about all the banking activities carried out by SBI bank in the rural areas. Where SBI bank appoints BC's who work on behalf of them in areas where SBI can't initiate the process themselves. The case also consists personal experiences of a marketing executive who used to work for the business correspondent and consumer behaviour of rural people are included in the case study.
In both developing and emerging economies, microfinance has vastly and increasingly been seen as one of the most important means for enhancing the lives of the poor and therefore a major tool for economic and social development mostly in rural areas. Lately, contrary to this widespread belief, critics have raised eyebrows against this growing popularity of microfinance as a major tool for enhancing economic development. Contrary to belief, they are of the opinion that microfinance is a ‘make-belief’ that is hindering economic and social development rather than enhancing it.
269). There is no easy way for those with little money to begin earning interest on savings or obtain loans with reasonable interest rates: the banking community is failing the poorest people (Banerjee & Duflo, 2012, p. 269). Also, Banerjee and Duflo (2012) assert that medical and agricultural insurance are not favored by the poor in spite of the fact that they could benefit greatly from such products (269). Their proposed solutions come in the form of microcredit (to provide access to more reasonable loans), electronic money transfer systems (to reduce the fixed costs of saving), and rewarding people for making good financial decisions (either via markets or the government if needed) (Banerjee & Duflo, 2012, p. 270). The incentives could even be something unrelated, such as bed nets, which then help the recipients in more than one way (Banerjee & Duflo, 2012, p. 270). This would need to be coupled with government regulation so that unscrupulous individuals wouldn’t have a way to easily game the system (Banerjee & Duflo, 2012, p. 270).
Poverty has stricken many developing nations. However, there are many ways to limit things like this from occurring, micro-loans being one of those things. It is apparent that women in developing countries are empowered by micro-loans. Micro-loans are a small amount of money given to small businesses. Micro-loans help make women more independent and help them not rely on their husbands for money. It helps these women in poverty get their kids and themselves an education with the money they receive. Additionally, micro-loans make it possible for women starting a business, in order to make more money. There are many benefits for women receiving micro-loans.
Microfinancing produces many benefits for poverty stricken, or low- income households. One of the benefits is that it is very accessible. Banks today simply won’t extend loans to those with little to no assets, and generally don’t engage in small size loans typically associated with microfinancing. Through microfinancing small loans are produced and accessible. Microfinancing is based on the philosophy that even small amounts of credit can help end the cycle of poverty. Another benefit produced from the microfinancing initiative is that it presents opportunities, such as extending education and jobs. Families receiving microfinancing are less likely to pull their children out of school for economic reasons. As well, in relation to employment,
Women in developing countries are heavily empowered by micro-loans. These women normally aren’t able to provide income for their family because of a lack of education due to low funds. On top of that, husbands are considered the money makers of the family, while women are expected to stay home and tend to their house and children. But micro-loans change all of this, as it gives women the power to start their own businesses. In full, micro-loans are very influential, and can help with women that struggle, and assist them in making more money.
Microfinance is grown to one of the biggest areas in fighting again poverty, it can be discussed, if microcredits are the best option to help people out of poverty. In the past it was almost impossible for the poor population of the world to get a loan with acceptable conditions. Banks would not lend to the poor, because the risk of losing the money was too high for them, which meant poor people in Africa had no chance of getting a loan from big banks. The so called “money lenders” would take advantage of this situation, and give the poor an opportunity to receive a loan. The “money lenders” were not trying to help the poor, they just wanted to earn money, thinking on their own personal benefit. That’s why their loans have insane conditions with interest payments of a couple hundred percent. If someone could not pay back the loan in time, they would take everything from the customers, and maybe even kill them. This was the only opportunity for poor people to get a loan until microfinance was born. Another problem is, that women have been excluded from the banking system in general in some regions of the world, because that was nothing women would do in their culture. In most cultures it was implemented, that women are staying at home, taking care of the house, children, and food. Men would go to work and earn the money for the family needed for the cost of living. It would also be more complicated for women to get a loan, because they traditionally work less than men, and
While the spread of microcredit as a development practice has enabled borrowers in many developing countries to access credit, not all experiences with microcredit have been positive. The original model of microcredit lending was not effective in alleviating poverty. To remedy this, an “improved” lending model was introduced; however, this model, too, has failed the impoverished citizens of the developing world because of its exclusivity. Traditional microcredit loaning systems require some form of material collateral to ensure that a borrower will repay their loan. This excludes the ultra-poor due to their lack of possessions to use as collateral (Schurmann and Johnston 2009, 521). To solve this issue and provide the poorest citizens with
Almost half of the world lives on less than $2.50. At least 80% of humanity lives on less than $10 a day. According to UNICEF, 22,000 children die each day due to poverty. Poverty is an ever-present issue that affects the lives of billions of people each day. There are many government subsidies that come into impoverished areas, but does money solve the issue of poverty? No, money alone cannot solve the world’s issue of poverty. In this paper, I want to discuss the role of microfinance in the developing world. Microfinance can be done poorly, which will continue to stunt the economic growth of an area, but if done properly microfinance can being human flourishment to a developing area. In order to take a closer look into microfinance, I will highlight the efforts that Kiva, an online lending company, has done to improve the economic horizon for many areas of the world.
Microfinance institutions (MFI) have created intense debates in an industry of traditional banking. Being primarily focused on mission of poverty reduction through economic stimulation of low income areas, MFI have sharpened the credit policy to specification of area of interests. The major distinction is loan interest rate being notably higher in comparison to profit orientated financial institutions (Rosenberg et al. 2009). The reason roots in excessive cost of funds and administrative loses faced by growing industry. As noted in Cull et.al (2009), interest paid by borrowers represents the struggle of MFI to overcome the burden of expenses and achieve financial sustainability. The latter however, can be reached by altering the capital structure of MFI through diversification of source of funding or rejection of capital which can lead to malfunction. As soon as the changes are implemented, institutions can proceed to expansion reaching increasing return to scale and beneficially affecting sustainability. This essay would focus on the role on subsidies in performance of MFI. The rationale behind exploring this form of noncommercial capital is that total amount of subsidized capital in MFI reached almost 16 billion in 2009 (Bloomberg, 2012) posing a question regarding the alternative and probably more efficient use of respective funds to support poor. The second reason derives from the number of researches discussed later,
Integrated micro financial services through the development of saving-loans Cooperatives (Credit Unions) and Rural Banks (BPR)
As a financial intermediate we have every reason to have an expectation or forecast of operational risk that will be soaring over the company, any loss cause by inadequate internal process, people, and systems or by external events can be classified under operational risk (Barakat, 2014). To mitigate and control the possibility of loss exposures we have implemented measures that will aid in controlling and avoidance of the said.
RHB Banking Group, in steps forward to be environmental friendly organization, firmly believes in starting internally before conducting and inspiring externally. The Group recognizes the effects of a corporation can cause to the environment thus, are willing to dedicatedly applying environmental policies into processes involved and also educating workforce of RHB regarding the environment.
The generation of self-employment in non-farm activities requires investment in working capital. However, at low levels of income, the accumulation of such capital may be difficult. Under such circumstances, loans, by increasing family income, can help the poor to accumulate their own capital and invest in employment-generating activities (Hossain, 1988). Commercial banks and other formal institutions fail to cater for the credit needs of smallholders, however, mainly due to their lending terms and conditions. It is generally the rules and regulations of the formal financial institutions that have created the myth that the poor are not bankable, and since they can’t afford the required collateral, they are considered uncreditworthy (Adera, 1995). Hence despite efforts to overcome the widespread lack of financial services, especially among smallholders in developing countries, and the expansion of credit in the rural areas of these countries, the majority still have only limited access to bank services to support their private initiatives (Braverman and Guasch, 1986). In the recent past, there has been an increased tendency to fund credit programmes in the developing countries aimed at small-scale enterprises. In Kenya, despite emphasis on increasing the availability of credit to small and microenterprises (SMEs), access to credit by such enterprises remains one of the major constraints they face. A 1995 survey of small and
This critical analysis is done on journal study titled “Microcredit in Rural Bangladesh: Is It Reaching the Poorest?” which was published by the Journal of ESR. The analysis was performed with the aim of understanding the why the microcredit programs reached rarely to poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh. They found five reason behind this: supply, demand, NGDO’s norms and social issues, sustainable financial services and voluntary and non-voluntary dropouts. This paper also argues that microcredit is the not best way to help the poorest of the poor. This paper used two kind of primary data of source, firstly they conducted study in 1999 by World Bank as a part of study titled “Voices of the Poor”. It was organized in 8 rural and 2 urban cities of Bangladesh. (Nabi et. al., 1999) and the second study done in 2 rural and 5 urban cities of Bangladesh from the 1999 to 2000 and the title was “Listening to the Poor”. They utilized different method for finding result of not reaching microcredit facilities to poorest of the poor. This article was published in 2004 and mainly focus on financial capital to likely stimulate growth of poor in rural Bangladesh. And the author of Dr. Dipankar Datta is an advisor of concern worldwide. (Datta, D. 2004)