By Brian Williams Most Westerners did not know anything about microfinance until Muhammad Yunus, an early initiator in the field, won the Nobel Prize in 2006. However, microfinance has been a tool for poverty alleviation since at least the 1970s, when the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India, BRAC in Bangladesh, and ACCION in [...]

By Lauren Murphy My time spent at BRAC in Dhaka, Bangladesh, reframed my perspective on a surprising number of development and humanitarian issues. After experiencing life in both the city and rural areas of Bangladesh, I came away with a more nuanced understanding of women’s rights and equality, religious frameworks and development, and informal labor. [...]

During our seminar with Duncan Green and Lant Pritchett last Friday, we revisited the question of NGOs providing services that governments are expected to provide – thereby undermining the development of effective states.  This is terrain I initially touched upon in reaction to the Foreign Policy article decrying NGOs as “the new colonialists.” Lant used [...]