Standard Chartered Bank

As part of The Foreign Policy Centre's (FPC) India programme, the FPC in collaboration with Standard Chartered Bank organised a one-day conference on September 8 in New Delhi on 'Banking the Missing Middle': Strategies for Expanding Microfinance. The conference brought together key stakeholders from government, academia, business, non-government and media from India, the UK and Asia. The organisers had the support of the Indian High Commission in the UK and the British Council in India.

The conference examined approaches to developing segments of the economy that often cannot benefit from mainstream development and poverty alleviation programmes. Particularly small and medium enterprises, which are often excluded from conventional microfinance initiatives, have great potential to expand and provide employment to a growing labour force. It is crucial then that these enterprises are given the support they need to develop, and critical to this support is access to finance.

Speakers included P. Chidambaram, Finance Minister of India, the Rt Hon Alan Johnson, Secretary of State for the Department for Trade and Industry, and Maxine Olson, Resident Director of the UNDP in India and Nancy Barry, President of Women's World Banking.