A dialogue on the future of microfinance and international development

This dialogue contributes to the 50th anniversary and 200th issue of Mondes en développement (Developing Worlds), the French and Belgian journal founded in 1973 by François Perroux of the Collège de France. To mark the anniversary, we discuss what has been learned about microfinance, which, as a modern movement, is also roughly 50 years old. We discuss issues including the early history of microfinance and how it arose from new views on poverty in the 1970s coupled with fall-0ut from the global debt crisis of the 1980s; the role of rhetoric within the microfinance sector; debates over subsidy; changing views of group lending; gender and finance; and whether everyone wants to be an entrepreneur.