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Ten years ago, it was not fashionable for social enterprises to take loans. Even if they wanted to, nobody would lend them money... Many small social investment firms have emerged recently.

CGAP, Deutsche Bank, Grameen-Jameel and Islamic Development Bank have joined forces to challenge the Islamic microfinance industry to develop new ideas for business models.

Will regulating the microfinance market in Egypt help breach a gap between supply and demand? Sherine Nasr seeks answers

Poverty certainly emerged as the single most problem that lies at the heart of modern day crisis. It quite recently has assumed alarming proportions. Many efforts were made in the past but they could not wholly succeed. Among significant tools, the microfinance was also used for getting rid of poverty which quite recently plagued the whole world. There is always a room for innovation to be introduced to already existing structures. Though microfinance made some gains in alleviating it but with sufficient services the amount invested lie in the danger of being spent on the items of daily use owing to extreme poverty.

Jewish & Palestinian Students Unite to Answer Obama’s Call to Action in Cairo by Launching Lending Site to Empower Entrepreneurs in the Middle East.

The first microfinance project in Oman is to be launched by PlaNet Finance UAE to give financial assistance to entrepreneurs.

BEIRUT: The microfinance industry in Lebanon is considered to be relatively small and is estimated to have a potential of 190,000 active borrowers, Ziad Halabi, general manager of Ameen s.a.l said on Friday. "As of end 2008 the market consisted of 54,000 active clients, which means that only 28.4 percent of the market has been served, so we still have a gap of 71.6 percent in the market," said Halabi during a conference held at Haigazian Univerisity in Beirut. The conference aims to discuss the importance of the microfinance industry in Lebanon and the challenges facing it in addition to the potential of its future growth.

Microfinance has proven itself so far to be very resilient to what is happening globally, and its clients are not necessarily experiencing anything that is correlated to the events in the US, Bob Annibale, Global Head of Microfinance at Citigroup said on Tuesday.

During The Aspen Environment Forum Her Majesty Queen Noor of Jordan presented the King Hussein Leadership Prize which recognizes outstanding leadership in promoting human rights, sustainability and world peace. And the winner was Bob Freling, Executive Director of an American non profit called SELF -- the Solar Electric Light Fund, which has been solar-powering villages around the world.

Some progress has already been achieved, and this is encouraging. However, more needs to be done to introduce democratic and secular values into the relationships between men and women. In the absence of these, the concept of gender equality is a mere fantasy.

Two years after being launched as the first poverty-focused social business in the Arab world, Grameen-Jameel Pan-Arab Microfinance Limited (Grameen-Jameel) is celebrating significant milestones that are helping to transform microfinance’s impact across the Arab World.

According to a report in the Financial Times and an article from the Microfinance Gateway, fledgling microfinance projects are helping to revive the Iraqi economy after years of public sector dominance, a decade of sanctions, and six years of violence. The US, and specifically its military, is actively involved in these microfinance schemes as part of its war on terrorism. The projects typically involve loans of a few thousand dollars given to people with between one and three employees. By the end of January 2009, the US had made 41,728 loans, totaling USD 59.7 million.