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Business Daily: Lending to Africa's Poor

21/10/2014

Lending to Africa's Poor

BBC World Service - Business Daily, Lending to Africa's Poor

Eighty per cent of Africans can not get a bank account, let alone a bank loan. Why?

Eighty per cent of Africans can't get a bank account, let alone a bank loan. Are governments and banks effectively excluding the world's poor from micro-credit?

We look at a credit crisis in Africa. It is not the kind where there is too much money sloshing around - for most poor Africans there is none at all. Eighty per cent of Africans don't even have a bank account, let alone any formal way of getting a loan, and many say the banks are excluding them. We hear from one of Malawi's leading businessmen, Gospel Kazako, from a local businesswoman just starting up, and from the African Development Banks former chief economist, professor Mthuli Ncube, now a senior research fellow at the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford. We ask him why the continent's banks are so reluctant to give poorer people a helping hand. We also look at the still-untapped possibilities of micro-credit from one of its pioneers - the Nobel peace prize winner, Mohammed Yunus, of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

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