{"id":353,"date":"2010-06-28T16:18:45","date_gmt":"2010-06-28T16:18:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/unituslabs.org\/?p=353"},"modified":"2011-05-12T23:22:48","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T23:22:48","slug":"when-microcredit-isnt-the-first-step","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/unituslabs.org\/updates\/when-microcredit-isnt-the-first-step\/","title":{"rendered":"When Microcredit Isn’t the First Step"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sriram Gutta<\/h2>\n
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The microfinance movement has had great success in reaching over\u00a0150 million <\/a>poor and low-income households worldwide. Yet, for nearly 1 billion people living under $1\/day, microcredit is not the best first step. This group lives in the deepest and most profound levels of poverty and has little reason to believe that their children’s lives will be any different from theirs. Are these people bankable? If not, can we design interventions to get these people in to the cash economy?<\/p>\n

This is the first in a series of articles that I intend to publish on ultra poor populations and some of the organizations that are focusing on this segment. The series will also highlight some of the organizations that I work closely with, who are implementing innovative and market based approaches to target and serve the ultra poor.<\/p>\n

“Ultra Poor” (UP) refers to people at the very bottom of the socio-economic ladder – the ‘poorest of the poor’. This segment is seen as high risk and most organizations, given the pressure to scale quickly, cannot afford to serve it. It is tough to uniformly define or classify this population as they look different in different contexts and countries. They could be pavement dwellers in an urban setting, tribal populations in rural locations or even slum dwellers in certain areas. Some organizations define them as populations outside the reach of microfinance, while the others categorize them as people living under $1\/day. However, in most cases they have a combination of the\u00a0below characteristics<\/a>:<\/p>\n