Speech by RNW editor-in-chief Rik Rensen at the start of the Microfinance - Who Profits? debate in The Hague on Monday, 25 January 2010 

Your Royal Highness, visiting dignitaries, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome. Thank you for coming to this meeting about microfinance.

The concept of microfinance has been showered with praise in recent years because it creates opportunities for disadvantaged people around the world.

Opportunities poor people do not usually get. Opportunities which enable them to take part in their communities. To communicate eye-to-eye with their immediate surroundings, as world citizens.

I don't think I need to explain that microfinance can perform financial miracles. Nor do I need to explain what financial success can mean for a person's self esteem. Or, as your Royal Highness told a Dutch newspaper in 2006: "Microcredit gives people the chance to stand up for themselves. The fact that you have earned a dollar yourself means more than someone just giving you a dollar."

However, failures have also been reported in the world of microfinance. Or near-failures, when a micro-entrepreneur has not been sufficiently trained to make the right choices. For instance, when a farmer lacks the knowledge to assess the obligations that go with a bank loan.

Today, Radio Netherlands Worldwide wants to take the discussion about microfinance a step further. We need your input and we invite you to participate in that process in doing that. We want to look further than the benefits microfinance has brought to society. We want to take a critical look at the future challenges of microfinance.

We'll be doing that on the basis of contributions from today's speakers and panel members and in interaction, of course, with yourselves.

We'll be doing it another way too. One which chimes exactly with the deepest instincts of my job as editor-in-chief at Radio Netherlands Worldwide: using journalism to bring people from different corners of the globe in contact with each other. Letting Africans who have a micro-loan learn from Asians or Latin-Americans, and vice versa. Not just showing the success stories, but putting aside the rose-tinted glasses and pointing out emphatically that microfinance only works for people who can shoulder the responsibility.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide is the connecting element in these stories. In the coming months we will interact with people around the globe using a series of video reports made by our journalists. Reports from for example Morocco, Surinam, Nicaragua, India, Indonesia, Romania and even from the Netherlands. In our radio broadcasts, the microfinance phenomenon will be examined in ten different languages. All our editorial desks will be focussing on microfinance from every possible angle. Always in an interactive way in order to enable dialogue.

Radio Netherlands Worldwide is acting on the conviction that, as an international media production house, it may not be able to solve problems but it can certainly make a significant contribution to the free exchange of ideas on a topic of interest to us all.

We aim to extend the discussion beyond the experts and people in the field to interested citizens around the globe. We do so in the firm belief that an independent worldwide journalistic voice can help microfinance achieve the wider reach and impact that it deserves.

Thank you very much.