Intro

Indian microfinance institutions (MFI) currently serve 71 million rural poor. Pairing financial services with access to life saving health interventions such as health financing, telemedicine and other innovations has tremendous potential. But it requires further commitment and resources to reach scale. An international development organisation, Freedom from Hunger notes in a report on `Integrated Health and Microfinance in India: Harnessing the strengths of two sectors to improve health and alleviate poverty’. The report was recently released along with the Microcredit Summit Campaign and the Indian Institute of Public Health, Gandhinagar.