摘要：By the third quarter of 2008, as the financial crisis was consuming large investment and commercial banks and
the flow of credit dried up, the microfinance community asked itself how the crisis in the broader economy
would impact microfinance institutions (MFIs). Evidence from analysis1 of past crises has shown that MFIs have
weathered earlier financial sector upheavals in Asia and Latin America with only slight increases in arrears and
a negligible rise in actual credit default. Yet, microfinance institutions have changed substantially since those
crises of the late 1990s. Sustained growth rates of 25 percent or more have become the norm in many countries
since 2000, bringing more MFIs face-to-face with each other in many local markets. To finance this growth in loan
portfolio, MFIs have turned from their earlier public funding sources towards their clients and external creditors,
both domestic and foreign. Retail deposits and, for a growing number of MFIs, domestic and cross-border debt
enabled these sustained growth rates in the lending portfolios. Forthcoming 2008 operational and financial
results will yield early insights into the impact of the current crisis on MFIs, but an analysis of the preceding years
will describe the stage as it was set before the crisis began in full. What, then, were the salient evolutions in years
leading up to the crisis?
This analysis highlights several key trends that MFIs underwent in the 2005 – 2007 period. The publication of
MIX’s Trend Lines 2005 – 2007 MFI Benchmarks offers readers the first quantitative view on MFI operational and
financial performance in that period. Covering a pool of 487 MFIs , these benchmarks represent microfinance in
78 countries. Taken together, these MFIs represent 82 percent of outstanding loans and 75 percent of borrowers
at the end of 2007, a robust prism through which to view the evolutions in microfinance institutions in the lead
up to the financial crisis. In addition, this analysis draws on a new data set of funding liabilities for microfinance
institutions as of 2007. Benchmarks and further analysis of that data set are forthcoming.
