Microfinance Solvency & COVID-19: A Call for Coordination

As microfinance providers and their customers continue to grapple with the challenges of COVID-19, is a solvency crisis looming for the microfinance sector? If so, where will it most likely take hold, and what will happen to the customers now being served? What can be done to cushion the impact of failures within segments of the microfinance sector? If consolidations occur, what shape should they take to avoid adversely impacting customers? How can digitization improve the resiliency of individual microfinance institutions and the sector at large?

These are some of the burning questions the webinar will address on December 7, when NYU's Deborah Burand and CGAP's David Crush moderate a discussion with voices from the microfinance community. The webinar continues a discussion started earlier this year, when CGAP published the paper Microfinance Solvency and COVID-19: A Call for Coordination. Following the paper's publication, members of the microfinance community authored a blog series reflecting on the state of the industry and the call for coordination. In this webinar, the authors of those blogs will talk directly with each other and with webinar participants about what they are seeing and what can be done to ensure solvency challenges do not interrupt the delivery of microfinance services to poor communities.