Microfinance in Sri Lanka part 1

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2023

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Offering small unsecured loans to the world’s poorest was meant to transform the lives of millions but in Sri Lanka microfinance has left many women with debts they simply can't repay.

In a special two-part Business Daily report, Ed Butler visits the villages in Sri Lanka where many of those otherwise excluded from organised finance have taken small loans only for their finances to spiral into debt.

What's gone wrong with mircofinance? Has it led to a new wave of predatory lending?

Presenter / producer: Ed Butler Image: Women in Welioya; Credit: BBC

Transcript

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0:00.0	In 2011, the Fukushima nuclear power plant on the east coast of Japan was struck by a tsunami.
0:07.5	It triggered the world's worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
0:13.4	Fukushima, a new audio drama series from the BBC World Service, tells the story of how the disaster unfolded and of those living with its aftermath.
0:23.1	The radiation is here.
0:24.7	It's everywhere.
0:25.9	Search for Fukushima wherever you get your BBC podcasts.
0:30.7	Hi there.
0:31.7	I'm Ed Butler.
0:32.4	Welcome to Business Daily on the BBC World Service.
0:35.3	Coming up, the promise and challenges of microfinance,
0:40.0	crippling loans to some of the world's poorest people.
0:44.6	Every time we pay, they promise the debt will be reduced, the interest suspended,
0:48.9	but it never happens. I just feel like giving up. Life is just not hurt me anymore.
0:56.0	We hear from borrowers in Sri Lanka and speak to experts who say that the dream of extending cheap credit to the poor hasn't helped them. It's added to their economic misery.
1:08.0	People are basically tempted to borrow to make the ends that they don't necessarily know how to meet.
1:16.2	They don't think. They just borrow.
1:18.5	Small lending, big debts. That's business daily from the BBC.
1:24.6	We're coming to people who are people to the family to. No, no, I'm a lot of... A meeting in a small village of them, all of them, small village in northern Sri Lanka.
1:36.0	It's called Wellioia.
1:37.8	Dozens of local women, all of them small holders, have gathered here in a concrete building.
1:43.6	No windows, a bare floor, chickens pecking
1:46.7	in the dirt outside. For most of the women, there's just one topic of discussion today, debt,
	...

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