Business 2.0: Business and Enterprise Going Micro

It first started with Microfinance, and then it forayed into Microinsurance. The general idea has been to harness the potentials of piecemeal financing schemes to better the lot of people who find themselves at the periphery of the mainstream economies of most developing countries.
Most people at the bottom of the economic pyramid in most societies have somehow been excluded from enterprise and the formal economy by a potent combination of factors which includes: lack of technical and administrative expertise, finance and access to markets.
This has had the unfortunate consequence of stunting their economic growth and caging the aspirations of social upliftment from the bottom of the pyramid (BoP), thereby forcing most of their micro enterprise into administration or being left to struggle with the inevitable prospect of folding up just a few years after starting out in business.
However, things are beginning to look up for most of these micro entrepreneurs with the advent of microfinance and microinsurance.
According to Wikipedia, microfinance is the provision of financial services to low-income clients, including consumers and the self-employed, who traditionally lack access to banking and related services.
More broadly, it is a movement whose object is "a world in which as many poor and near-poor households as possible have permanent access to an appropriate range of high quality financial services, including not just credit but also savings, insurance, and fund transfers." Wikipedia Microfinance
The microfinance movement has rapidly taken root globally and has become a global movement especially among social entrepreneurs who see it as a veritable tool to eradicate endemic poverty.
Those who promote microfinance generally believe that such access will help poor people out of poverty.
On the other end of the table, microinsurance as it is also described by Wikipedia is “insurance characterized by low premium and low caps or low coverage limits, sold as part of atypical risk-pooling and marketing arrangements, and designed to service low-income people and businesses not served by typical social or commercial insurance schemes.” - Wikipedia Microinsurance
Microinsurance can be a very useful tool in ameliorating the suffering and hardship people at the BoP are often exposed to by the unfair realities and circumstances of life.
As Manuel Bueno discussed in his recent blog posting, microinsurance aims to help low-income people manage risk and reduce their vulnerability to shocks.
A useful examples of how microinsurance has helped poor people in need is the unfortunate case of Monica Kirunguru, a poor Kenyan woman who’s husband was hospitalized and eventually died.
Microfinance and microinsurance hold immense potentials as major tools for combating poverty, and if their potential is properly harnessed, the world could witness a dramatic revolution which would see the next billion rising from the BoP to the middle income level on a global scale.