Family Economic Stability

Systemic poverty weaves its way through generations: Poor parents lack access to financial resources, quality educational options and decent health care. Driven by need and spurred by lack of opportunity, their children leave school to work in low paying, often exploitative jobs and, later, raise children who face the same problems. For India’s nearly 100 million urban slum residents, who lack access to clean water, sanitation and anything but the most rudimentary housing, the struggle is acute. We view urban microfinance in India as a tool that can help give underprivileged Indian children a chance at stable, productive adulthoods.

To promote family economic stability in India’s impoverished slums, we have committed more than $25 million in grants and equity investments to urban microfinance institutions (MFIs) working in urban neighborhoods. Our work in this area follows several tracks:

• We collaborate with MFIs to responsibly scale a range of services including:
  • Microloans
  • Microcredit, microtransfer and microsavings services
  • Microinsurance
  • Micropensions
  • Financial awareness and planning
  • Financing for affordable housing
• We support MFI programs that help finance basic infrastructure services such as water and sanitation.
• We support the ongoing global initiative to identify rigorous methodologies and standardized metrics for evaluating the success of MFI programs in terms of both their financial and social performance.