I would say there has been success, yes, but the question is whose success? And micro-finance is a good tool, but if it is not moulded to affect agricultural enterprises—and we all know that agriculture has a lot of variants—so that people will be more willing to lend to other people who are doing secondary interventions because they can repay.... But if you want to lend to women to go and grow their vegetables or to keep chickens, and they come and tell you that the chickens died, then you don't want to go that way as an economist.
So I would propose that this is the right place for us to increase aid, but to also be flexible and to think about other ways we can use micro-finance. I wish my East African friend were here. There is something we call pesa taslimu, meaning legal tender. How do we see African resources? Do we see them more in the way of dollars? If I had a cow, you would still call it a resource, but does that mean if I brought my cow as a way of exchange for micro-finance you would still accept it? So I would call for redefining what we call resources.
I would also call for incubating the poor, for systems that enable the poor to come to a level where they are creditworthy, because the kind of poverty we are defining here is a kind of poverty that keeps you out of the system, so that even accessing micro-credit can really be a big problem.