Microfinance Microfinance: a general overview and implications for impoverished individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

Microfinance

Microfinance: a general overview and implications for impoverished individuals living with HIV/AIDS.

Microfinance among people living with HIV faces some opposition and remains understudied. This literature review examines microfinance's evolution and impact on a variety of social and health indicators and its emerging implementation as a primary prevention tool for HIV and economic intervention for people living with HIV. There is an abundance of literature supporting the apparent utility of microfinance. However, our understanding of the subject remains clouded by the heterogeneity and methodological limitations of existing impact studies, and access limitations to microfinance curbs our understanding of microfinance for this population. Existing literature suggests that people living with HIV could attain economic stability from microfinance and achieve successful repayment rates in some settings. The precarious socioeconomic and health issues of people living with HIV pose unique challenges to minimizing loan default risk. Carefully-designed clinical studies are needed to assess whether people living with HIV can be as successful with microfinance as healthy individuals.

Editors’ note: This article is essential reading for everyone. Most readers will know something about microfinance – Mohammed Yunus and the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh were awarded the Noble Prize for Peace in 2006 for ‘their efforts to create economic and social development from below’ through microfinance. This review article provides detailed explanations of the principles of microfinance (microcredit and microfinance), solidarity groups, village banking, and newer strategies to prevent loan default such as flexible repayment and provision of microinsurance (disability life/accidental death and credit life/death insurance). With poverty affecting half of the world’s population (i.e. living on less than $2.50 per day) and poverty, food insecurity, physical health, and mental health so inextricably linked, interest in microfinance as a poverty-alleviating tool is high. It has the potential to move individuals and communities to higher levels of physical and psychosocial wellbeing. With antiretroviral treatment offering hope and longer lives to so many people living with HIV, microfinance activities - loans, conditional and unconditional cash transfers for people living with HIV and/or microfinance to their partners – are increasingly being considered. After reviewing all the published literature on HIV and microfinance, the authors argue cogently that the question is not ‘Should people living with HIV receive microfinance support?’ but rather ‘Which people living with HIV should receive microfinance support, and what should the support include?’.