ABSTRACT
Indonesia is probably the country with the greatest diversity of both conventional and Islamic microfinance. The former has evolved for a period of over one hundred years, preceded by a prehistory of informal finance, whereas the latter has evolved since 1990. Indonesia possesses one of the most differentiated microfinance infrastructures in the developing world, comprising some 6,000 formal and 48,000 semiformal registered microfinance units serving about 45 million depositors and 32 million borrowers, 800,000 channeling groups and millions of informal financial institutions and self-help groups (SHGs). There is hardly an institutional type of microfinance not found in Indonesia. One of the most successful microfinance models worldwide, the reformed village units of Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI), was designed by the Harvard Institute for International Development (HIID) in the early 1980s (Annex 1).
