I just ran across your blog. I am a microfinance consultant (over 10 years)and share your interest in sustainable large scale solutions–especially for the bottom billion. I have been using the Lange series in many conversations since it first came out.

The most important part for me was the following about focus on the bottom billion:

[MYTH] Wealthy nations must work to reduce poverty everywhere.

Why? This well-intended ethic is driven by a natural – but in this case dangerous – human tendency to focus on relative standing, independent of absolute wellbeing.
…….
This seems like the fair objective, pursued in the belief that reducing disparity supports social stability. But it’s wrong.
There’s an enormous opportunity cost to devoting limited resources to better-off, mid-tier developing countries. Their citizens, while struggling, aren’t dying by the millions every year. The last billion are.

In my experience, microfinance is rapidly falling into the same trap for great business reasons, but with far less results for bottom billion microfinance to help the poorest billion leave poverty.

There are some good answers to this to energize focus on the bottom billion, but successful MFIs and MFI networks are drawn to the great business case to serve the more profitable 90% of MFI clients above the bottom billion where over 95% of the money, investment, grants and profits lie and often hide behind appealing rhetoric about “serving the poor or serving the poorest of the poor” without serving large numbers of the bottom billion.

Microfinance is too good a tool for changing extreme poverty for the bottom billion to not focus more on the bottom billion niche.

Tom