villagefinance

‘Villagefinance’ is a site dedicated to the millions of bright, courageous and upright women and men living in villages around the developing world. They know the importance of building safe, strong institutions in their villages, but too often they have seen elite capture and institutional weakness or failure.

Often we, their development partners, have sown the seeds of collapse with one hand even while we have been planning for success with the other. Individual NGOs and INGOs often believe that they can ‘go it alone’. But village finance deserves to be treated as a serious domain for inquiry and innovation, requiring cross-organizational and cross-disciplinary collaboration. The villagefinance site aims to bring together not just practitioners but academics from economics, anthropology, microfinance and other disciplines, as well as policy makers and students who are fully engaged in this exciting domain.

The village finance community of learning is dedicated to overcoming the constraints that hinder safe savings mobilization and sound institutional governance under conditions of significant growth. It will strive towards a discussion, learning, practice and feedback loop that is intended to do nothing less than reinvent village finance, by distributing learning and best practices across the globe.

This site is maintained by Brett Hudson Matthews. Practitioners are welcome to blog here on frontier village finance issues. If you are interested, please contact me (at brett@mathwood.ca)!

Brett Hudson Matthews