Voa development report - Banks Look to Expand Microfinance Services

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is the VOA Special English Development Report.

Officials from of the worlds leading banks were in the Netherlands week for a conference on microfinance lending. The Dutch and the nonprofit organization Women's World Banking organized the meeting.

Mary Ellen Iskenderian is president of New Women's World Banking. She told us from The Hague people generally think of microfinance only as credit ---- small loan to start a business. But she says group has found more and more demand for other of services. The organization is working with banks to products like, for example, life insurance policies.

She the question is not if commercial banks can offer services in a profitable way. The question is how. bankers discussed things like the use of mobile phone in banking, and the ability of banks to offer in rural areas. Could people do their banking at point of sale in a village store, for example?

meeting brought together representatives of the Global Network for Innovation. Women's World Banking formed this network six years . It says the aim is to guarantee responsible lending poor borrowers.

The network is an alliance of major banks and microfinance lenders in fifteen countries. Members Citigroup in the United States, ING and Triodos Bank the Netherlands, Equity Bank of Kenya and Banco Azteca Mexico.

Women's World Banking offers support, advice and training more than fifty microfinance organizations. The group says it helped twenty-three million people in forty-three countries receive financial over the last thirty years. Most but not all the borrowers are women.

As more commercial banks microfinance, Mary Ellen Iskenderian says women must continue to served, to reduce poverty. She says research has shown for every dollar a female borrower earns from her , ninety-eight cents is reinvested.

Women use their earnings educate their children and to improve their homes and , she says. A similar male borrower, she says, will only sixty cents.

The idea for Women's World Banking out of the first United Nations Conference on Women, in Mexico City in nineteen seventy-five-.

And that's the Special English Development Report, written by Jill Moss. You learn more about women's issues at voaspecialenglishcom.. I'm Faith .

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