This book considers various types of microfinance schemes and compares the effectiveness of different approaches in aiding poverty reduction.

The provision of credit and other financial services has become increasingly seen as the answer to the problems facing poor people. Microfinance interventions have the capacity to increase incomes, contribute to individual and household security, and change social relations for the better. But it cannot be assumed that they will do so and it may often be more effective in terms of poverty reduction to combine credit provision with other...

In On Beauty, Susan Johnson explores the role of beauty in our lives, and in her life in particular: She writes of where her own search for beauty has taken her, how beauty enters the body like desire, and how beauty is nothing less than life's call to order, life's bid to save it from itself.