Microfinance in Sri Lanka: part 2

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2023

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We hear about one Sri Lankan woman’s struggle with debt after taking out a small loan - what does her story tell us about how to lend to people unable to access finance through banks all over the world?

In a special two-part Business Daily report, Ed Butler investigates what's gone wrong with microfinance. It was once seen as a progressive way to help people like Renuka Ratnayake improve their lives, but has it led to a new wave of predatory lending?

If you are affected by any of the issues covered in this programme, you can find information at www.bbc.co.uk/actionline.

Presenter / producer: Ed Butler Image: Renuka Ratnayake; Credit: BBC

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. Welcome to Business Daily here on the BBC. Today, one poor farmers struggle with a global menace, predatory lending. It's driving many women to despair.
0:15.2	I couldn't pay the installments and I went into arrears. That made the interest rate go up.
0:21.8	There was no way we could pay it all back.
0:24.0	Millions of Sri Lankans may be in too deep, the figures suggest.
0:30.7	One of them came one morning at 9 o'clock with his lawyer.
0:34.8	They stayed until 2.
0:36.3	We had had nothing to eat that day. I had nothing to give
0:39.9	my children and they insisted that I pay 30,000 rupees. What's going on in Sri Lanka's microlending
0:46.9	market? Business Daily from the BBC. It's the rainy season in northern Sri Lanka.
1:01.4	Often when it rains, it really pours.
1:07.6	I've come to the home of Renica Ratnaika,
1:15.4	she's a 45-year-old smallholder in the village of Wellioia in the north of the country.
1:24.1	From the safety of her porch, she shows me a tiny plot of land on which she and her husband grow rice and a few vegetables.
1:29.0	So just tell me, which is your land?
1:32.0	Which part of this belongs to you?
1:42.1	I have about half an acre, and that's from that side pose to that flower tree over there.
1:47.6	If he don't grow rice, we can grow things like peas, chickpeas and cashews.
1:50.2	And that's what we do off-season.
1:58.2	And then the downpour relents, almost as suddenly as it arrived.
2:02.3	We're now walking through huge open.
2:03.4	These are dry paddies.
2:05.8	We're walking on the paddy fields where the rice is grown.
	...

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