The Domestic Micro-Credit Gap
Nov 10th, 2008 | By Dawn Rivers Baker | Category: OperationsLate last month, the Social Venture Network announced the recipients of its 2008 Innovations Awards, one of which was Jonathan Lewis, founder of MicroCredit Enterprises. MicroCredit Enterprises is a private sector anti-poverty program that helps to fund microcredit programs. It’s innovation was to guarantee the loans that microfinance organizations use to capitalize their loan funds, only the money for the guarantees comes from socially conscious, high net worth individual investors. It’s a great idea but it has one big problem: it is not available to U.S.-based microenterprise development organizations.
It’s a peculiar thing that so many philanthropists want to combat poverty in the third world but are not inclined to do anything about it here. And, among those who do want to fight poverty on American soil, microenterprise development does not seem to be their cause-of-choice, in spite of its sustainable ‘teach a man to fish’ model. There have been some hints that federal support for microenterprise development will be more forthcoming from an Obama Administration, even if some tweaking will need to be done to their intial proposals. But it would be helpful if there were more social entrepreneurs working their magic here in this country, in addition to confining their focus to similar efforts overseas.
