Nirmala is proud to have been elected treasurer of her microcredit group, but the role brings great responsibility.
The traditional values of property ownership make it harder for women to negotiate a loan, so the NGO has set up their own microcredit foundation to do just that.
His Thai Rak Thai party, whose policies of cheap health care and microcredit had won strong support from rural voters, was subsequently dissolved.
With the help of a microcredit bank, they have increased daily output to 2,000 bars of crumbly soap the colour of Dijon mustard.
Muhammad Yunus, the head of Bangladesh's Grameen Bank and the industry's founding figure, has described Vikram Akula, SKS's founder, as a "capable young man [who] took a wrong turn when he decided to use microcredit for making money".
Critics of microcredit and cash transfers as a panacea for poverty have posited that not everyone is a potentially successful entrepreneur; access to economic resources, they say, will therefore just benefit those self-employed individuals who are industrious.
In eastern and southern Africa, many microlenders promote condoms.A more challenging idea is to combine microcredit with micro-health-insurance.
IN MUCH of the world Muhammad Yunus is known as the genial pioneer of microcredit and the winner of the 2006 Nobel peace prize.
Following a meeting with Mr Zoellick, he told reporters that it should sharply increase the proportion of its total lending devoted to microcredit programmes.
Abroad they had a big hand in the "green revolution", which raised agricultural productivity in poor countries, and in the development of microcredit through the Grameen Bank.Yet Mr Fleishman packs an iron fist inside his velvet glove.
But more emphasis goes to helping the poor gain assets, such as education and property titles, and through land reform and microcredit programmes.Which way forward?The way forward, Mr Williamson concludes, is to "complete, correct, and complement the reforms of a decade ago", not to reverse them.
