The Small Industries Development Bank of India may revamp the microfinance equity fund scheme to support the small and medium sized micro lenders, which perennially struggle to get equity as well as debt funding.
The Microfinance Institutions Network (MFIN) is in talks with Sidbi to revamp the fund, MFIN chief executive Alok Misra said.
Misra said that the condition of the smaller MFIs has not improved significantly, but is now better placed than their situation one year after the pandemic when they faced severe liquidity crunch.
“We are now geared to assist the sector in its next phase of progression through mainstreaming of informal micro-enterprises who would be the real engines of growth,” Sivasubramanian Ramann, Sidbi chairman was quoted as saying at an event to unveil MFIN’s second microfinance review report.
The India Microfinance Equity Fund was a Rs 300-crore quasi-equity and debt facility targeted to support smaller MFIs. Sidbi had committed Rs 200 crore to 66 MFIs till March 2019 and disbursed Rs 144 crore. After that, the fund became largely inactive.
Capital from Sidbi would help them to leverage and sustain.
MFIN took various other initiatives like the Impetus platform to assist small MFIs raise funds.
Last year, the Reserve Bank of India came up with Rs 25,000 crore and Rs 16,000 crore funding facilities to ease out the sector’s liquidity stress. While big MFIs benefit the most from these, smaller ones remained mostly starved of liquidity.
The microfinance sector contributes about 2% of the country’s gross value added and created job opportunities for around 1.5 crore people
As of March 2022, about 200 different entities were active in the microfinance space. Twelve banks active in microfinancing through joint liability group model held the 40% of total micro-credit of Rs 2.85 lakh crore. NBFC-MFIs (84) are the second largest provider of micro-credit with 35.2% of the total industry portfolio, followed by small finance banks (9) with 16.9% share, other non-banks with 6.9% and other MFIs with 1%.
