A $75m global consortium led by Deutsche Bank, and featuring Standard Life and the Cooperative Bank, is one of the strongest signals yet that, as the United Nation's 2005 'year of micro-credit' ends, bottom-up funding for micro-businesses in the world's poorest countries could be a new financial market.
The consortium, working with the US International Development agency, is the first fund of its kind to tap a wide range of western institutional investors for tiny loans to entrepreneurs in the developing world trying to work their way out of poverty.
Paul Wolfowitz, president of the World Bank told a UN forum last month: "Microfinance is a powerful tool for reducing poverty. It enables people to increase incomes, to save and to manage risk. It reduces vulnerability and it allows poor households to move from everyday survival to plan for the future."

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