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Away from our seeming obsession with the financial crisis or bankers' bonuses, a quieter financial revolution in microfinance has been slowly unfolding across the developing countries of the world.

Microfinance is often defined as providing small loans to clients earning less than US$1 a day and who traditionally cannot access credit, because they lack regular income or assets to secure as collateral. Given a loan, they have a chance to invest in buildings or raw materials, tools and machinery, or livestock.

More broadly, microfinance brings a range of financial services to the marginalised poor: not just credit, but insurance, savings and money transfer services. Microfinance is explicitly a way to help people help themselves out of poverty, a tool for socioeconomic development.

There are several well publicised success stories. At one end of the scale, the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh is targeted at women, has more than 8 million borrowers, promotes social development and has helped many get out of poverty. A diverse range of much smaller microfinance initiatives also exists.

An annual meeting of the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), a consortium of public and private development agencies, took place in Nairobi in May 2010. Reflecting on the past 15 years, CGAP's CEO commented how microfinance has expanded its reach enormously, greatly increased its transparency and matured from 'a cute development idea' into a legitimate and regulated part of the financial system in many countries.

So what of the downturn? With some of the underlying financing from non-government sources but other funding tied to the public purse-strings, the impact of the global recession on microfinance initiatives is hard to predict and likely to be variable. Small-scale schemes divorced from international markets may even be relatively sheltered.

Here at Manta Ray Media, our own focus in the international arena includes classical tropical medicine and disease control but also extends into more holistic areas such as socioeconomic development and poverty reduction.  We are in early talks with a microfinance organisation and welcome opportunities to help others deliver their mission.