IMTFI researcher, Erin B. Taylor gets qualitative in her latest blog on ethnography and microfinance:
"A problem with microfinance is that profit margins have to be very narrow to keep costs down.
If prices rises even a little, the world’s poorest people–for whom these products are intended–will not be able to afford them. This is why it is often necessary to keep a product range simple...
Private/public partners
"Where a market alone cannot support a product, non-profit funders (such as NGOs and multilateral development banks) may step in to provide support. This has been the case with both microcredit and mobile money, both of which are profit / non-profit hybrids....
Getting qualitative
"Qualitative research, such as ethnography, can reveal patterns of behaviour that we never would have expected. The best example of this that I have come across in recent times is David Stoll’s study of a Guatemalan village, described in his 2013 book “El Norte or Bust!: How Migration Fever and Microcredit Produced a Financial Crash in a Latin American Town.”
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