In “Vikram Akula: Business Basics
at the Base of the Pyramid”, I was
surprised to learn more about microloans and how they work. In my economics
class in high school we talked briefly about the challenges of offering these
types of loans and the effect that they could have on the economy in developing
nations. It was nice to see how microloans can help improve a nation. It was a
little surprising that they only offer loans to women but when they mention
that “women are more likely than men to reinvest profits in the household and
to support others in their borrowing group” (Akula), it makes a lot of sense.
In
this article I didn’t find any section to be particularly confusing. It’s been
a while since I’ve taken an economics class that covered microfinance, but
overall the article was simple to understand.
It would be interesting to know Akula’s
view on loaning money to single fathers. Since in developing nation there are
such a large number of women who die during childbirth it stands to reason that
there would be at least a small population of single fathers. Based on Akula’s
reaction to first having to deny the women a loan before he started his own
business, it would interesting to know his reaction to single fathers. I would
also be interested in knowing what the secret was to overcoming the challenges
of having a successful microfinance business since I’ve always heard most
attempts at starting one have failed.
For this article I didn’t disagree with
anything that Akula mentioned. I found most of the article to be somewhat like
a narrative so it was refreshing to hear about a real life story instead of
reading about concepts and how they supposedly apply to the real world.
No comments:
Post a Comment