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Welcome to the Duke Microfinance Leadership Initiative (DMLI)

Welcome to the Duke Microfinance Leadership Initiative (DMLI) We are a collection of students, faculty and staff at Duke University building connections across campus and beyond to the fast-growing worlds of microfinance, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable enterprise.

We offer a range of opportunities for you to get involved. These opportunities include hosting innovative and exciting events; advocating for and sponsoring academic courses on microfinance; multi-disciplinary research forums; and career development and connections with leaders in the field. We are dedicated to fostering the career development of future leaders in the field through internships and other hands-on experiences in the U.S. and abroad.

A recent addition to our work is our own Microfinance Investment Fund, which is partnering with Nkokoneru Savings and Credit Cooperative (SACCO) in Uganda, a small but growing credit union that provides loans to local micro-entrepreneurs. This partnership will provide new capital to SACCO, and provide DMLI students with a "Living Laboratory" for learning about how microfinance really works. This will include participating in the loan development and sending DMLI members post loan-cycle to measure impact of the loans on each recipient. We plan to make our first capital transfer this spring, and send a small team to Uganda this summer to help implement the new loans program and monitor its impact.

Our team is growing by the day, so come inside, see what we are up to, and find out how you can get involved!

What is Microfinance?

Accessing credit at reasonable rates is difficult for much of the world's poor. This greatly inhibits their ability to grow their own enterprises, thereby limiting their ability to improve their living conditions. Microfinance is an effort to provide credit to the poor. Traditionally, the poor have had difficulty securing credit because the perception of lenders has been that such creditors were at high risk for default. Microfinance addresses this gap in financial services, making small loans to help local entrepreneurs launch new businesses, generating new revenues and employment sources within communities. Over the past three-plus decades millions of small-business owners and thousands of communities have benefited from the microfinance model. Poor communities have proved the skeptics wrong with sustainable loan repayment rates leading to fast growth in the microfinance sector. Microfinance is growing in popularity due to its model, which combines social impacts and financial sustainability. It is being used for a growing number of purposes that go beyond business loans to address an array of problems facing low-income communities across the world.

News

 • Posted on October 15, 2008

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