Sustainable Microfinance - Balanced Scorecard's added value for ...

2.4 Microfinance in (Western) Europe
Micro-credit and microfinance in (Western) Europe are rather new phenomena and
were first put seriously on the agenda in the early nineties. In a relatively short period
both have been embraced fully by politicians at the European Union, and at some
national levels (see figure 2.3), as a valuable instrument for social and economic
development (Molenaar, 2009). There is a spread belief in Europe that microcredit
can play an important role within the 10 year Lisbon strategy for growth and
employment and achieve social inclusion, which goals should have been achieved by
2010 (Canale, 2010).
In the 2007 Survey of the Microfinance sector in Europe (Jayo, Rico and Lacalle,
2008) an assessment was made of the Mission Statements of the majority of the
organizations. These could be classified into the following four main categories:
• Job creation and entrepreneurship promotion;
• Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) and economic development;
• Financial inclusion;
• Social inclusion and the fight against poverty.
Figure 2.3: Number of Loans Disbursed by Country 2008-2009 (Molenaar, 2010)
Due
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to the different missions of different organizations, different perspectives and
models have been developed. One perspective about microfinance is that it is
sustainable: ‘Dozen of institutions have proved that financial services for poor people
Elmar Hoogendoorn 16
Sustainable Microfinance