MFI’s mission is to bring about productive deployment of capital in rural areas in order to facilitate the transformation of the rural economy for greater prosperity.

We operate on the belief that to make a lasting difference, rural lending must become an economically motivated profit-making venture that can achieve scale within every local economy, but that scale alone is insufficient. Fundamentally, rural credit must be put to productive use. Today the rural entrepreneur faces a great many challenges. While microfinance has succeeded in bringing interest rates down relative to local money lenders, the poor rural customer still pays the highest rates of interest in the country today. This means lower returns and growth rates for the rural entrepreneur relative to their wealthier urban counterparts that contribute to an increasing divide. Compounding this problem are lower levels of education as well as poorer access to markets for their products and consequently greater risks of failure.

We therefore take a comprehensive approach to building the rural economy that includes

• Developing and implementing efficient models of SHG training to prepare rural women, and recently men, as good customers for institutional credit.

• Developing and implementing training programs that promote successful entrepreneurship among its members.

• Creating products and services that facilitate greater access to new markets.

• Carrying out various ‘behaviour change’ efforts that encourage SHG members to move away from the expectation of subsidy and handouts and take greater responsibility for their own development and the overall development of their villages.

In all of these efforts, we strive to create operational efficiencies. Today, MFI has the lowest operational costs in the country, a benefit that can be passed on to its members by its lending partner Madura Micro Finance Ltd. in the form of lower interest rates.

While MFI operates as a not-for-profit company, in keeping with its philosophy, all of the programs and activities of MFI are funded entirely from fee-based income from its lending partners (generally a percentage of the interest spread on lending). The ability of MFI to carry out its mission is therefore tightly linked to its performance.