The "Microcredit" Example

The Microcredit Example is Relevant to Microdemocracy

Is individual action on the micro level significant? What about many individual actions on the micro level? What is the aggregate affect?

When microcredit started to take root more than thirty years ago, there were already large formal systems for providing credit, but tens of millions of hardworking indigent people in poor countries had no access to them. They had to rely on a rigged credit market where they had no choice but to accept loans on horrible terms. They dug themselves deeper and deeper into poverty. Ambitious national and international plans to end poverty did not spend much time looking at the significance and consequences of hundreds of millions of individual loans and interactions.

Thirty years later, Microcredit – the simple idea that loans could be given to individuals at a rate and in a way to help them become more self-sufficient – has transformed the loan experience for hundreds of millions of poor people around the world. That was a significant change on its own, but it did not end there.

The transformation of the loan experience led to many other positive changes and outcomes for individuals, and when it happened on a large scale, it affected villages, regions and countries. Eventually, the idea that very poor individuals could find their way into the mainstream economy through microcredit was recognized as a strategy not only for putting a tiny amount of capital in the hands of a few people, but also as a way to fight poverty, strengthen an economy and improve the lives of tens of millions of poor people. Not bad for an idea about investing in people where they are.

While microcredit aims to bring more people into the economic mainstream, the idea of Microdemocracy points to the need to bring more people into the democratic mainstream as full participants in decisions that affect them, no matter where they are made or who is making them.  Microdemocracy opens up a new pathway to democratic action on many levels.