Microfinance promised to help lift millions of people from poverty in the Global South. It’s a way for low-income individuals to access credit — something they couldn’t receive from traditional financial institutions, like banks. 

It came to Cambodia in the 1990s as a poverty-alleviation strategy after decades of civil war. At first, microfinance was run by nongovernmental organizations with a number of checks and balances on the size of loans, the number of loans given and interest rates, according to Nithya Natarajan, a lecturer at King’s College London.

But in the early and mid-2000s, commercial banks took over microfinance and wanted to make more profit.

“Those checks and balances were largely eroded because the commercial push meant that the emphasis was more on expanding the market, trying to reach new consumers all the time. So, it went to more poor and more precarious households,” she said.