PENELITIAN TERHADAP PERANAN MIKRO KREDIT DALAM MEMBASMI KEMISKINAN: KAJIAN KES KE ATAS PEMINJAM MIKRO KREDIT FORMAL DAN TIDAK FORMAL DI PULAU PINANG.

The microcredit programme is an initiative of microfinancing to cultivate entrepreneurship in society, producing business activities, creating job opportunities and generating economic growth. Formal microcredit programmes from institutions, commercial banks or development banks are found to succeed in eradicating poverty. Other than that, there is also an informal microcredit scheme that offers financing to merchants. This shows an overlapping of power in evaluating the effectiveness of microcredit programmes either offered by formal or informal institutions. This article identifies the effectiveness of formal and informal microcredit financiers that offer financing to small business owners in Pulau Pinang to deal with poverty among them. The research design is qualitative whereby the research instrument used open-ended interviews. The respondents are selected using purposive sampling involving 20 respondents who are in business and received microcredit loans either from formal or informal institutions. The data analysis for this study is based on field notes. The study also uses quantitative analysis to present the respondents’ profiles. While the actual analysis is through qualitative data, the finding shows 100% of respondents tend to choose the formal microcredit scheme compared to the informal scheme although there are issues and problems in the formal microcredit procedure. The finding shows that, the microcredit is effective in reducting poverty among the respondents. About 60% of the respondents received more than RM2500 a month. Furthermore, there are suggestions from the respondents to improve the microcredit institutions. Among the suggestions are to ease the loan procedure, increase the amount of loan and offer a grant to buy the equipment or tools for the business. Therefore, this study is expected to provide input to every formal and informal microcredit institutions to organise their strategies towards improving the loan procedure for microcredit institutions in Malaysia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]