Turning to Islamic Finance for Meeting Development Goals – III
I take pride in being from the academia. In the world of Islamic economics and finance, the sense of pride is more intense. I am a witness to how seminal …
Turning to Islamic Finance for Meeting Development Goals – II
The DEEP project was a trailblazer in many ways. The program was initiated at a time and in a region where two-third of population (according to World Bank estimates) was …
Turning to Islamic Finance for Meeting Development Goals – I
It was the year 2006. It was my maiden assignment at the Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) to explore and take stock of the nascent Islamic microfinance sector. Microfinance had caught …
A Smart Campaign for Individual Donors
A “smart campaign” is a familiar term in the context of microfinance that seeks to help the poor. It is about being fully transparent in the pricing, terms and conditions of …
Baitul Maals in India: Some Observations
Large sections of Indian Muslims are poor. They also tend to get excluded from the formal banking and financial system for a variety of reasons including their aversion to Riba …
Do Muslim Poor Self-Exclude Them from the Financial System for Reasons of Faith?
In an early study “Islamic Microfinance Development: Challenges and Initiatives” undertaken by the Islamic Research and Training Institute in 2007, we observed that most of the member countries of the OIC …
Making Sense of Onion Economics in India: Can Islamic Finance Help?
I was motivated to write this piece by the story of a poor farmer in India. The story of this 48-year old farmer Devidas Parvane from the Rasai village of …
Growing Potatoes on the Shores of Nile: A Successful Experiment in Islamic Microfinance
An abundance of fertile arable land, water resources on the shores of Nile and the presence of a hardworking farming community in the region have led a Sudanese microfinance outfit, …
Salam-Based Microfinance by BoK ? III
Salam has traditionally been understood as a mode of agricultural finance. Indeed, as scholars point out, one of the reasons why salam is admissible as an Islamic mode, even while …
