S7 Ep25: Roshaneh Zafar on 30 years of microfinance and mindset change in Pakistan

About this episode

Roshaneh Zafar discusses her journey in microfinance and its impact on women's empowerment in Pakistan over the past 30 years.

Wherever Roshaneh Zafar went in Pakistan in the early 1990s, documenting World Bank social development projects, women told her the same thing: the water and sanitation are fine, but what about economic opportunity? Zafar tells Tim Phillips how that question led her to train with Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank, and then back to Pakistan to found Kashf Foundation in 1996 — the country's first specialised microfinance institution for women. Thirty years on, Kashf serves more than one million clients, has covered six million lives through micro-health insurance, and has financed over 3,000 low-cost private schools. Zafar describes a model that long ago outgrew its Grameen origins: customised for Pakistan's diversity, run on a partnership rather than a hierarchical footing, and now embracing climate risk, ultra-poor programmes and AI-assisted credit decisions. The episode also confronts the question: Does microfinance actually empower women? Research has questioned whether it makes a difference. Zafar has ten years of longitudinal data that tells a different story, and a view on why the two bodies of evidence are not as contradictory as they appear. Research and references…

People in this episode

Host: Tim Phillips

Guest: Roshaneh Zafar

Topics covered

• microfinance
• women empowerment
• economic opportunity
• Pakistan
• social development
• climate risk
• AI-assisted credit

Keywords

• microfinance
• Kashf Foundation
• women empowerment
• economic opportunity
• Pakistan
• social development
• AI credit decisions
• climate risk
• Grameen Bank
• longitudinal data

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: World Bank, Grameen Bank, Kashf Foundation

Books & works: The Miracle of Microfinance? Evidence from a Randomized Evaluation

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