Around the world, there are thousands upon thousands of charities doing wonderful work for worthy causes. There is never a shortage of need. In almost every community, both local and global, there is work that needs to be done. However, because of the ubiquity of need, there also tend to…...
Logistics of Microfinance: The How
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…...
Overcrowding and Underfunding: Microfinance and Slowing Urban Concentration
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.…...
Donor Spotlight: Ruth Ohlrogge
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…...
Microfinance and the Environment: Where Responsibility Meets Sustainability
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…...