Over the past four decades, microfinance - the provision of loans, savings, and insurance to small businesses and entrepreneurs shut out of traditional capital markets - has grown from a niche service in Bangladesh and a few other countries to a significant global source of financing. Some 200 million people globally now receive support
from microfinance institutions, with most of the recipients in the developing world. Today the microfinance industry faces major challenges, including mobile banking and other technology, as well as concerns that some markets are oversaturated with microfinance. How the industry confronts these challenges will determine whether it will
continue to grow or be subsumed within the larger global financial sector.

Join the Jewish Federation of the Berkshires and the editors of the recently published book The Future of Microfinance:

Ira W. Lieberman, founding director of the CGAP Secretariat, the de facto secretariat for the microfinance sector globally whose work on microfinance has continued over the past twenty-five years and Paul DiLeo, managing director of Grassroots Capital Management. They will share this important story of how microfinance developed, how it has met the needs of hundreds of millions of people, and how it can continue to meet those needs in the future.