Introduction

Prior to the Asian financial meltdown of 1997—8 and the deepening political

and economic crisis that befell Indonesia following the collapse of

international confidence in the Indonesian Rupiah, the World Bank estimated

that there were 800 million people in absolute poverty in the Asia-Pacific

region, more than two-thirds of them women or girls. Chronic balance of

payments problems in the Asian Tiger-economies in the latter years of the

1990s, especially in Indonesia and South Korea, and to lesser extent in the

Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and Malaysia, has seen the Asian miracle come

unstuck. In Indonesia, where the crisis was more severe than elsewhere, the

collapse of the Rupiah saw three-quarters of the GDP wiped out almost

overnight. Inevitably, the human tragedy of these events deepened as people

who had worked hard to achieve livelihoods well above the poverty line
again found themselves in the poverty mire. The incidence of poverty spread

as the crisis deepened. For those people robbed of their wealth and

livelihoods by these events, access to locally administered and managed

microfinance services are more crucial than ever if they are to rebuild their

lives and reclaim the standards of life that the world now acknowledges as a

basic human right.

To describe the Asian meltdown as a regional crisis of unparalleled2