Hello friends,

Thank you for logging on to our website and for your interest to know about us. We welcome you to our very special development space!

While delivering microfinance services, we have realized that it doesn’t stand alone, the various developmental activities stand as pillars of support. The implementation of both becomes easier if they complement one another. It is akin to a two way street – both are interlinked and interdependent to some extent. Putting together microfinance work with developmental activities such as education, health, employment generation, livelihood and the like can prove to be a successful model. Therefore all microfinance players ought to adopt the credit plus approach which will integrate timely and adequate credit into larger developmental processes.

Providing only credit for sure helps an organization achieve financial and operational sustainability and be profitable much faster compared to credit plus institutions. The former helps to reduce ‘relative poverty’ and increase income in ‘absolute terms’ where as the latter contributes towards easing out ‘extreme poverty’ and increasing income in ‘relative terms’.

I am happy to share that our activities under this development wing are running well and in fact now are in the mode of expansion. We are working in crucial areas of education, health, unemployment, livelihood and others. We have taken two of our initiatives viz. hard core poor program and health program beyond the boundaries of West Bengal - to the underdeveloped North Eastern states. We have also recently inaugurated another program which will develop women in Mumbai and Kolkata as drivers. This is going to be an interesting project and we are excitingly looking forward to see the upshot.

I wish to take the opportunity to thank our donors for supporting our endeavors. We express our heartfelt gratitude to each one of them. Since we plan to expand our development work, we are on the look for more donor support, though the strategy of contributing a portion of the surplus from microfinance activities for the development programs still remains in place.

Let us remember that Microfinance is not just money. There is an ardent need for repackaging microfinance. Let us together make honest and sincere attempts towards credit plus intervention which will facilitate broad based development and help complete the picture.

Happy reading!

Cheers,

Chandra Shekhar Ghosh
Senior Ashoka Fellow
Founder & Mentor
Email id: mentor@bandhan.org