What means and ways for Micro-Finance for what impacts?

Micro-Finance is one of the strongest and the most original innovations of development actions during the 1990’s. We need to understand the functioning and the stakes of these local financial institutions as well as the role that their beneficiaries would like them to play, regarding personal and collective strategies.

A very large approach is required to take into account both :

• the relationship of the populations with finance and money
• the network of social relationships involved through a system of debts and acts of payment that accompany what is usually called as economic transactions.

Besides analysing the financial behaviour of the Indian people, this project also focus on evaluating the impacts of the local dynamics induced by micro-finance. One of the issues of our seminars is the better understanding of bonded labour due to debt and how Micro-finance can deal with it.

This seminar will be a first operation , for the development of the Micro-Finance programme in the Social Science Department of the French Institute of Pondicherry. The aim of the project is to set up an Indo-French cell of information, documentation, competence and evaluation on the social dimensions of finance in South India. Besides the researchers in assignment at Pondicherry, this cell is expected to network different specialists of micro-finance issues in the local development.

Given our experiences in organizing conferences and seminars in France dealing with micro-finance, we wish to introduce some periodic meetings of this type at Pondicherry , taking into account cultural and institutional features at national and local levels. Unlike the meetings organized in order to implement or evaluate specific programmes, this meeting involves some interactions between people having different approaches which will be fruitful. It will allow to enrich the knowledge of the researchers in their fieldwork. And for the practitioners, it will allow them to gain a wider knowledge of their field of action and to think of "best practices".