2020/03/06 by Lily Geismer · 3 citations
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Economic growth #Economics #General partnership #Geography #Law #Microfinance and Financial Inclusion #Political science #Poverty #Public administration #State (computer science) #Summit #Welfare
paper · doi:10.1093/jahist/jaaa010
published in Journal of American History 107(1), 107-131 (Oxford University Press)
openalex publication_date 2020/03/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
In February 1997, Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered the keynote address at the inaugural Microcredit Summit to more than 2,900 people from 137 countries gathered in Washington, D.C. “Although it is called ‘microcredit,’ this is a macro idea,” Clinton asserted. “Whether we are talking about a rural area in South Asia or an inner-city in the United States, microcredit is an invaluable tool in alleviating poverty, promoting self-sufficiency and stimulating economic activity.” And, more importantly, it had helped policy makers jettison “the conventional … thinking about the poor, about economic opportunity, about partnership between the public and private sector.” The concept of giving loans and credit to poor people to start very small businesses or “microenterprises” in the United States and around the world was central to the Clinton administration agenda.1 As Clinton explained in her speech, she and Bill Clinton had championed microenterprise since their time as the first couple of Arkansas more than a decade earlier. In the mid-1980s, the Clintons had invited Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and the figure many credit with first formulating the concept of microenterprise, to Arkansas to help design a program to distribute small loans to low-income rural residents as a means to lessen welfare dependency and stimulate local economic growth. The experience launched what Bill Clinton would deem in 1997 “this obsession, almost, that we have with microenterprise” and convinced the Clintons to “go national with this micro idea in a very macro way,” which he did in his 1992 presidential campaign and after his election.2