Microfinance and the challenges of rural finance in sub-Saharan Africa

Microfinance is defined differently depending on the country and the authors, but we humbly note that microfinance refers to the mechanisms that make it possible to offer very small loans to very poor families to help them carry out productive or income-generating activities, thus enabling them to develop their very small businesses (Yunus). In the same sense, an MFI is also defined as an organization that offers financial services to low-income people who have no access or limited access to the formal financial sector. In other words, an MFI is a formal organization whose main activity is microfinance. Burundian Microfinance includes various stakeholders ranging from the informal to the formal sector. ¿For the informal sector, endogenous savings and credit practices are observed in rural as well as urban areas. They take the form of mutual aid, tontines and usurious loans, but the interest rate is high.