As European Microfinance Week concluded, the conference hosted a live plenary debate on whether there’s still room in microfinance for “the little guy” – ie: smaller MFIs.

Here’s some background on the debate:

Microfinance has been facing headwinds in some key markets in the last three years. Many MFIs that were supposed to be on a strong growth trajectory have fallen short of expectations, and they are now struggling to reach scale. At the same time smaller institutions – tier 2 and tier 3 MFIs – sometimes have more resilience to shocks than expected, and are capable of closer relationships with clients – if not massive scale.

The livestream is available via Facebook.