With increasing assistance from the World Bank and other donors, microfinance is emerging as an instrument for reducing poverty and improving the poor's access to financial services in low-income countries. Providing the poor with access to financial services is one of many ways to help increase their incomes and productivity. In many countries, however, traditional financial institutions have failed to provide this service. Microcredit and cooperative programs fill this gap. They provide credit through social mechanisms such as group-based lending to reach the poor and other clients,...

Rural energy's importance to the Bangladesh economy cannot be underestimated, The problems rural people face in obtaining safe, clean, and reliable energy supplies are not minor inconveniences. People are cooking with biomass fuels including large amounts of leaves and grass that expose them harmful indoor air pollution. They light with kerosene or sometimes candles which give off a dim light that hampers studying and reading in the evening. Finally, rural productivity suffers because of lack of access to modern energy. However, the picture also is not all bleak. This study underscores how...

Agricultural development through crop diversification, irrigation, high yielding crop varieties, and public investments in infrastructure has improved food security and its seasonal dimension worldwide in recent years. Consequently, the severity of seasonal hunger caused by agricultural crop cycles has lessened substantially. Yet in agricultural pockets scattered throughout Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, seasonal hunger persists, especially among the rural poor, owing primarily to idiosyncratic shocks caused by agricultural seasonality. More than four-fifths of the world's poor live in rural...

Bangladesh has the world's fastest growing, off-grid solar home system (SHS) coverage. The number of SHS installations has risen phenomenally--from a five-year target of 50,000 in 2003 to 50,000 a month a decade later. By early 2014, installations totaled more than 3 million. Even so, this figure represents just 10 percent of the country's off-grid households, suggesting ample room for continued program expansion. Surge in Solar-Powered Homes: Experience in Off-Grid Rural Bangladesh assesses the country's remarkable growth in SHS, its support schemes, and welfare impacts for rural households....

The recent past has witnessed phenomenal growth in microfinance institutions (MFIs) around the world. Today, as many as 200 million people are beneficiaries of microfinance. With its worldwide attention, microfinance has also received serious criticism, including that it is a fad with less-than-expected benefits for the poor. Surely, microfinance is not without limitations. Yet the premise of improving access by the poor to financial services for consumption smoothing has never been a subject of controversy. What has been controversial is whether microfinance can alleviate poverty. That the...