Microfinance in sub-saharan Africa: Will not ensuring capacity building be a potent tool for promoting structural transformation and sustainable development?

Many of current researches done in various countries in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), as it regards the impact of microfinancing on entrepreneurship, livelihoods and poverty reduction, comes out with similar recommendation(s): the need for microfinance institutions (MFIs) and/or the government to focus on training, education, skill upgrading, or awareness creation for the MFI clients and the institutions themselves. We link these recommendations to the absence of, and therefore the need for, a well-thought-out curriculum for capacity building as key deliverable of microfinancing in fulfilling its desired effect. As microfinance is deemed to serve the ‘unbanked’ who are often ‘unsophisticated’ in their livelihood activities, capacity building becomes as “extension” services to improve clients performance. We associate the intended effects of the provision of capacity building to be in sync with the intensions of structural transformation and sustainable development. This is a concept paper.