All inclusive microfinance : A study of the demand for Islamic microfinance in Malawi.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Microfinance is the number one buzz word in the development sphere nowadays. The basic idea of microfinance is to make financial services available for those excluded from the conventional banking system. By charging market price interest rates on the loans granted the business is meant to become sustainable and independent of fluctuations in cash flow from donor funding. The microfinance sector in Malawi is relatively young and still in the development phase. Since the majority of the charity organizations running microfinance projects in Malawi are originating from the Western world, the services these institutions offer are inherently affected by Western (Christian) banking culture. This paper investigates if this set up results in the exclusion of Malawi’s Muslim population due to the fact that Islamic law prohibits Muslims from charging or paying interest on loans. The conclusions of this thesis are that the Muslim population uses the microfinance services to the same extent as their Christian brethren. However, a large proportion of the Muslim clientele feel that they are morally prohibited from using the microfinance services because of the interest rate charged. They only make use of the interest-based loans because they have no other option, and would thereby prefer services compatible with Islamic law. My recommendation is for the microfinance institutions to embrace this knowledge and further investigate the need of Islamic microfinance, and the possibility to implement it, before the consequences becomes more than a moral issue.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".