The World Bank and Microenterprise Finance: From Concept to Practice

This report is a desk review of project documents which considers the World Bank's ("The Bank") approach to the innovation in light of the practices of some of the most successful recent non-Bank experiences. The focus is on showing how the structure of microfinance projects, at the design stage, is crucial for their subsequent success or failure. The results show that:

• The Bank's basic approach to supporting microenterprise finance is sound;
• There has been significant improvement in Bank performance;
• Bank microenterprise projects are still performing less effectively than Bank projects generally.

The central finding of the report is that greater emphasis should be given to the commercial viability of microfinance institutions.