Seminar with Maria Borelius

The world today has 3,7 billion people living on less than 2 dollars per day. Their main challenge is the lack of a job, and an income. An enormous amount of jobs need to be created to raise world incomes. It is here that micro-finance has proved an important tool. The awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Mohammed Yunus in 2006 produced a worldwide recognition of the possibilities enabled by micro-finance in the efforts to diminish poverty and improve democracy in societies around the world. With financial innovations such as solidarity groups and its focus on those who traditionally lack access to banking services, micro-finance has helped thousands, many of them women, to achieve financial independence.

Although often connected to countries such as India and Bangladesh, the problems addressed by micro-finance are not exclusive to the developing world. In the developed economies of the Western world, ever bigger population groups are burdened by marginalization, often leading them outside the formal economy. As a consequence, from the US to Spain and Denmark micro-finance is advocated as an effective tool to improve the life of socio-economically vulnerable individuals.

Micro-finance has changed forever the tools we use to alleviate poverty in both developing and developed economies as well as the way the poor are acknowledged by established financial institutions. It has led to a democratization of the financial services to serve, as well, those that had always been considered non-bankable. The next generation of micro-finance, what has been called micro-finance plus, combines micro-finance solutions with strong training in an effort to develop knowledge and social capital of the women involved. It is argued that micro-finance plus leads to a turbo effect when it comes to income generation and enterprise development.

At this seminar we will have the opportunity to meet Maria Borelius. As a former CEO of Hand in Hand International, she supported the development of Hand in Hand organizations in India, South Africa, Kenya and Afghanistan, where today some 700,000 women are engaged in enterprise creation programs. She is currently involved in an initiative to expand micro-finance plus to Sweden, in an effort to address the situation of marginalized women of migrant descent. She will discuss the possibilities and problems with such programs, and give general tips on how to create support, funding and momentum for programs to address poverty and marginalization.

Program

13.30 - 13.40: Welcome and introduction

• Ester Barinaga, Associate Prof., MPP

13.40 - 14.25: Micro-finance as a tool for poverty alleviation

• Maria Borelius, former CEO, Hand in Hand

14.25 - 14.35: Coffe-break

14.35 - 15.30: Open discussion