Obama and Microfinance

Still feeling my GO USA! buzz from the recent election, I became very interested in the impact Obama will have on the BOP movement. I was very pleased on what I found. Reading through a blog posting on Microcapital, I discovered that Obama's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, was a "long career researcher and practitioner of Microfinance". She worked with such organizations as USAID, Asian Development Bank and the Ford Foundation--consulting on microfinance, women empowerment and sustainability projects.

Even more interesting are Obama's own comments about poverty and microenterprises, in one of his policy proposals he notes: “The challenge is to build the capacity of communities and countries in the developing world to generate wealth on their own. Building on the growing evidence that micro finance works, an Obama administration will provide initial capital for an SME Fund.”

I have often reflected how it was even possible that microfinance has developed so rapidly in the past few years, with a US administration that has too often believed that force and violence were the first moves for development solutions. I do truly believe that Obama will take a much more level headed, innovative approach to international development and I am optimistic about the long term benefits that the BOP effort will yield.