Microfinance is a successful financial innovation to help the poor to sort out credit exclusion
which is one of the poverty traps that prevent billions of underserved especially women from
escaping atavistic misery. Interconnected poverty traps range from misuse of natural resources
(from blood diamonds to the oil curse) to conflict traps demographic booming being landlocked
with bad neighbors or exposed to unfreedom. Other traps concern cultural backwardness unsafe
drinking and sanitation food shortage up to starvation illnesses or climatic shocks causing
mass migrations and unfair globalization. Microfinance a grass-roots movement to provide
credit to the neediest can greatly help to dismantle at least some of these poverty traps and
thousands of mostly small institutions are competing in a market where demand from the poorest
for financial services is potentially unlimited while supply is not. While the success of
microfinance often ignited by foreign aid funding has gone beyond any expectation enormous
problems are still on the ground. The road towards what is now considered microfinance s
optimal goal maximization of outreach to the poorest combined with financial
self-sustainability is still full of obstacles. Prof. Moro Visconti's book covering a vacuum
in the existing literature considers state-of-the-art microfinance within a broader framework
of sustainable and long-term socio-economic development. With an innovative and reader friendly
approach Moro Visconti introduces the reader to the multidimensional causes of poverty and
possible remedies. A cultural approach to the poverty traps mixing its anthropological causes
with possible bottom-up remedies including microfinance emerges as a stunning innovation. The
book aims at a broad readership from practitioners to students and academics as well as
readers simply interested in solutions to the world-wide poverty problems.
