Targeting the Ultra Poor

What Happened to the Poorest? CGAP, the international microfinance consortium, started off its life as the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest. After five years, it dropped that claim, acknowledging that most of what it was doing failed to assist the poorest. While Muhammad Yunus has continued to push for attention to the lower rungs (e.g., Yunus 2006), most of the industry has pushed back. Most microfinance institutions serve poor and lower-income customers, but not the poorest. For the sake of concreteness, we define the “poorest ” as households living on under $1.25 a day per person (in purchasing-power parity adjusted dollars). The World Bank counted roughly 1.4 billion people living below that line in 2005 (World Bank 2010)