Chapter 20 A Study of Microfinance on Sustainable Development Shital Jhunjhunwala and Prasanna Vaidya 20.1 Introduction In 2015, United Nations Organization (UNO) announced the Sustainable Develop- ment Goals (SDGs) which are adopted especially by South Asian countries to address the sustainable issues such as poverty, gender inequality, education, health, economy and so on. Despite the economic and technological breakthrough, South Asian coun- tries account for 36% of the world’s poor [1] and 736 million people are living on less than $1.90/day [2]. The concept of credit was a relevant and useful programme which took a big bounce in the 1970s when Yunus’s Grameen Bank in Bangladesh began to institu- tionalize. Later, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his microcredit movement contribution on the modern concept of microfinance in 2006 [3]. The idea of microfi- nance was introduced to help, uplift the living standard of poor people and empower women. Microfinance is the arrangement of minimal credits to the poor people, to enable them to participate in new productive business activities and to extend existing ones [4]. It allows them to join in self-employment projects that contribute to generate income and improve their social status and standard of living. However, microfinance includes a broader range of services overtime. Microfinance is a developmental tool for providing financial services, namely: credit, saving/deposit, insurance, leasing and money transfer, and repayment services. It also includes social intermediation The original version of this chapter was revised: The figures 20.1 and 20.4 are updated with the correct figures. The chapter and book have been updated with the changes.. The correction to this chapter is available at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3647-2_44 S. Jhunjhunwala (B ) · P. Vaidya Department of Commerce, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, North Campus, New Delhi, India e-mail: casjhunjhunwala@gmail.com P. Vaidya e-mail: prasanna.vaidya2@gmail.com © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020, corrected publication 2020 P. K. Kapur et al. (eds.), Strategic System Assurance and Business Analytics, Asset Analytics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3647-2_20 275