Tom

In this blog, we often write about the benefits that microfinance is able to offer to communities to fight poverty, balance gender disparities, avoid environmental degradation, etc. However, the logistics of how microfinance itself functions is sometimes lost in the margins. To understand any story, one must always start at…...

Around 75% of the developing world’s poor still live in rural areas. However, urban growth in these same countries accounts for much of the United Nation’s predicted global population increases. Not only are these levels of urban migration increasing every year, but the rates are becoming more and more unsustainable.…...

One of the main pillars of microfinance is its focus on women. In terms of financial institutions, microfinance stands alone in its prioritization of the economic health of women. In fact, over 80% of all microloans are afforded to women. In a world where few options exist for women to…...

As we begin to recognize more and more of our donors for the integral help that they provide in assisting our programs and our mission, we would like to recognize one person who has an intensely personal connection to Wisconsin Microfinance: Ruth Ohlrogge. A Madisonian through and through, Ruth grew…...

Many times on this blog, we have brought up microfinance’s role in breaking the “cycle of poverty.” We place a great deal of importance on this issue as the repetitive nature of poverty means that breaking the chain for one person can mean that their entire family will not be…...

Usually, business development and environmental health are talked about as being mutually exclusive entities. Stories of clear-cutting rainforest for soybeans and livestock or mountaintop removal mines in West Virginia certainly reflect a reality in which, too frequently, short-term profits spell the death of entire ecosystems. Of the world’s 1.3 people…...

Without a doubt, the greatest advancement of the last 50 years has been the revelation of the internet. Paired with the rising tide of globalization, technology has linked the world like never before. With the increased spread of communication has come a world without barriers or boundaries, allowing people and…...