After the war in Bosnia was over it was micro­cre­dit that helped the coun­try find it’s way out of the dev­as­ta­tion. Accord­ing to an AFP arti­cle, The 15 micro­cre­dit banks in Bosnia have 400,000 clients with a port­fo­lio of 500 mil­lion euro’s.

Ana­lysts say that micro­cre­dit in Bosnia is still on solid ground despite the global eco­nomic reces­sion. Defaults in loans have increased, but the banks there have enough resources to make it out of the recession.

From this AFP arti­cle hosted at Google News, reporter Sabina Niksic vis­ited some of the banks in Bosnia.

In the Sara­jevo sub­urb of Lukav­ica, women gather once a month at one of them, the Mikra agency, to col­lect money which repays their loans.

Mikra uses dif­fer­ent mod­els of lend­ing to the poor, includ­ing the so-called vil­lage bank­ing model where loans are granted to groups of peo­ple in which peer pres­sure and col­lec­tive respon­si­bil­ity helps ensure pay­ments are made.

Loans can grow only if the ini­tial debt is paid off.

“In Lukav­ica, we have 270 clients, but only three or four have dif­fi­cul­ties repay­ing loans,” Mikra’s Vedran Zamet­ica told AFP.

But the global eco­nomic cri­sis is hav­ing an effect on this sec­tor, which since 1996 reg­is­tered a steady default rate of less than 1.0 percent.

“The trend of growth of port­fo­lios at risk started at the end of 2008,” Nejra Nalic, the direc­tor of Mi-Bospo micro-credit foun­da­tion, told AFP.

“Since Octo­ber last year until the end of May 2009, the per­cent­age of our port­fo­lio at risk has grown by 100 per­cent,” said Nalic.

How­ever, experts say micro-credit remains one of the health­i­est seg­ments of Bosnia’s econ­omy
…

Dur­ing crises, micro-credit remains the only hope for peo­ple like Nagorka Govedar­ica who at the end of Bosnia’s 1992–1995 war was a widow strug­gling to raise five chil­dren on a mea­ger school teacher’s salary.

Today, in her house near Sara­jevo, Govedar­ica runs a pri­vate day-care cen­tre for 60 chil­dren in which two of her daugh­ters work thanks to a micro-credit loan.

“All I had was a good busi­ness idea and this house, I was not eli­gi­ble for a bank loan, but I bor­rowed from Mikra,” Govedar­ica told AFP.

Govedar­ica has out­grown micro-finance and is now also bor­row­ing from banks, but her expe­ri­ence with Mikra has taught her not to take more than she can repay.

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