Talk:Village Banking

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The only reference in this article is to FINCA's own documentation. There are several excellent third party studies (Westley's Tale of Four Village Banking Programs in Latin America, several from the MicroBanking Bulletin many studies on the Microfinance Gateway and at Alternative Finance, etc.) available and this article should reference some of their findings. Some of the comments in this article is inherently extremely difficult to verify (level of poverty of clients for example). There have been serious questions raised about the effectiveness of the village banking methodology -- especially in its core goal of triggering independent village-based financial institutions.

Village banking and its methodology is a small part of a much larger field in microfinance of community-based methods. It relies heavily on previous precedents of social capital lending including ROSCAs, ASCAs, bonds of association and other work in solidarity lending. None of this is evident in the existing article.Brett epic 16:27, 26 July 2007 (UTC)