Reaching the Poorest Billion

Despite immense promise in microfinance across the globe, there are still people whose needs may not be met by the longstanding microfinance industry: these are the poorest of the poor. Grameen Foundation’s Solutions for the Poorest program is focusing its resources and expertise on ensuring the world’s poorest people have access to reliable financial services and business opportunities.   

Imagine living with only $1.25 a day…except that you don’t earn exactly that amount every day.  Some days your husband will bring home two or three dollars, and other days, nothing.  Sometimes you are able to sell something for a 50 cent profit, and other days you cannot.  Regardless of how these sums come into your household, you have daily pressures to spend–to feed your children and send them to school, to stay healthy enough to keep working, to repair your house when the rain comes. 

The world’s poorest people have built creative survival skills to manage their household finances to protect their families and their livelihoods. Often, despite these survival skills, these households find themselves hit by a financial shock from which they cannot recover – driving the family deeper into poverty and less likely to have the opportunity to access financial services or business opportunities that could help them bounce back.  Solutions for the Poorest believes that sustainable economic opportunities do exist for the very poor.  We are dedicated to ensuring that the poorest people have access to resources they can rely on to manage their finances and better business opportunities that provide more reliable, predictable sources of income, especially in times of shock.  Solutions for the Poorest is in the early stages of identifying and testing a variety of microfinance and businesses solutions we hope to reproduce and expand in coming years for the world’s poorest people.

One aspect of our strategy is a micro-savings project: we will help three partner microfinance institutions in Africa and Asia reach 1.45 million new savers in the next three years – substantially boosting the availability of savings services for the vulnerable poor through funding by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We will also be working on ways to better integrate financing for very poor people with businesses they can easily run.