Class Description and Syllabus Building and （类描述和课程建设和）.pdfVIP

Class Description and Syllabus Building and Financing Microfinance Institutions and Their Financial Products Professor James B. Carlson NYU Stern School of Business, Spring 2011 Course Number: C15.0042.01.SP11 Class Days: Mondays and Wednesdays Time: 9:30 – 10:45 a.m., Room: 3-90 Overview: Microfinance has been hailed as one of the most effective tools for combating poverty through loans, grants, insurance and other financial products offered to the poorest of the global poor around the world. As an international development strategy, it represents a major shift from governmental “top-down” to a private “bottom-up” approaches and has revolutionized the approach to poverty alleviation and economic development. It also continues to be a model of social entrepreneurship, bringing creative business and financial strategies and tools to complex social and economic problems, as well as a wedge for empowerment of women and other disadvantaged citizens in some societies. To expand finance and sustain microfinance, however, microfinance institutions are becoming sophisticated financial institutions that structure, distribute and then finance a growing array of financial products and services to the global poor, which require increasingly sophisticated financing strategies as the global capital markets and leading financial institutions become the funding sources for microfinance institutions. At the same time, microfinance institutions are confronting fundamental changes in their operating environment and therefore their basic financial and business models. Certain microfinance instituti