MICROCRÉDITO EN COLOMBIA (Article published in Spanish)

Abstract

The paper presents a cursory review of the main programs and activities conducted in Colombia in the last decades to satisfy the need of financial resources of micro businesses. It also introduces a Research Program that two Colombian Universities have been conducting on the subject of micro credit in association with several universities and research centers of North America, Asia and Africa. The Program’s main objective is to improve our understanding of the way in which financial co-operatives operates and, based on this, to put forward recommendations to increase the efficiency of this kind of intermediaries of micro credit, which are particularly important to this sector given their better prospects of being financially sustainable in the long run. A secondary objective of the program is to asses if the credit services provided by financial co-operatives have contributed to reduce poverty. The Research Program is still in progress and the results so far are preliminary. However, our findings suggest that small co-operatives are more efficient than large ones. The potential benefits of economies of scale are over come by the expense preference behavior of managers of large co-operatives. In addition, financial co-operatives in general have not been using credit assessment and monitoring technologies that have been developed elsewhere and seems more appropriate in dealing with micro enterprises than the technology of credit used by large banks. With respect to the effect of micro credit services provided by co-operatives on poverty reduction our preliminary results indicate that it has not been important, although it has great potential, especially in rural areas.