Four Great Microfinance Books

Savaging Dambisa Moyo's Dead Aid yesterday left an ugly aftertaste. To cleanse my palette, I offer a list of fantastic books on microfinance. All are written by intelligent and deeply thoughtful people who have immersed themselves in their subject. They think and write with clarity and sensitivity. In no particular order:

• Elisabeth Rhyne, Mainstreaming Microfinance: How Lending to the Poor Began, Grew, and Came of Age in Bolivia (Bloomfield, CT: Kumarian Press, 2001). The story of the commercialization of microfinance and Bolivia, told by one of the players. A major inspiration for the "development as building institutions" plank of my book.
• Stuart Rutherford, The Poor and Their Money (New Delhi: Oxford University Press: 2001). Prominent in my chapter 2 and one source of inspiration for the "development as freedom" plank. I believe Stuart is working on a new edition now for Practical Action Publishing. A really old version is here.
• Helen Todd, Women at the Center: Grameen Bank Borrowers after One Decade (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1996). A powerfully written report on a year in the lives of 62 women in two villages. One big flaw: she excludes from her study women who borrowed from Grameen but then dropped out in ten years or less. So read it as showing what microcredit can do for some women, rather than what it does on average.
• Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, and Orlanda Ruthven, Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), due out in June. I'm going out on a limb here, because I've only read a bit of my bootleg copy. The authors tell us what they learned from tracking the finances of many poor households in excruciating detail using "financial diaries." [Update: I reviewed it.]

Some of these are best found through used-book channels such as abebooks.com and amazon.com.Enjoy.