Vanatau belongs to the poorest countries of the pacific areas. Many people are out of reach of modern and secure banking services in the rural areas of Vanuatu. Some people that are employed by the government must make long trips to the nearest branch of the National Bank of Vanuatu (NBV) to deposit their salary in the bank. Some farmers are even hiding their money by burying it in the ground rather than going the [...]

The Inter-American Development Bank(IDB) sponsors a new pilot rating program in Latin America set up by S&P to improve the infrastructure of microfinance institutions for national capital markets. S&P and IDB are cooperating in this project with the aim to gain acccess to the capital markets for the MFIs. Standard&Poors involvement is a breakthrough in the microfinance industry, S&P talks the same “language” as investor and their benchmarking tools really opens up the capital markets [...]