"MUSHARAKA"
PARTNERSHIP FINANCING - AN APPROACH TO
VENTURE CAPITAL FOR MICRO-ENTERPRISE
The author would like
to acknowledge with thanks
the valuable advice he received from Ms. Nawal
Adam, of the Small Business Research Group, Faculty of Economics, University of
Gezira, Wad Medani.
Malcolm Harper - Cranfield
School of Management, August 1994.
Micro-finance
has been vigorously, and reasonably, promoted as an effective and potentially
sustainable approach to poverty alleviation. It is natural that any popular
innovation, however excellent, should be the subject of some critical
reappraisal after the first rush of enthusiasm, and
micro-finance is no different. One of the main areas of criticism has related
to the difficulties faced by the borrowers whose businesses fail.
This
hardship has been inflicted by fellow group members, with or without the
encouragement of their bank worker, and it has meant that some people, usually
the most vulnerable in a community, have definitely been worse off as a result
of their membership of a borrowing group. Another
quite different difficulty has been the problem of decapitalisation
as a result of the impact of inflation; although inflation world-wide is less
serious than it was, there are still many poor countries with double digit
inflation, and some with triple figures, and the currency problems in South
East Asia may be expected to lead to
some worsening of this.
If
genuine sustainability means covering inflation as well as all the other costs
it becomes even less attainable. One little-known approach to micro-finance
which solves both these problems, and which also has the advantage of being
very ideologically popular with some policy makers as well as with some of the
more traditional micro-finance customers, is Islamic partnership financing.
There are few examples of this having been applied to small or micro-finance,
but the paper
which follows describes the experience in Sudan, and gives some introductory
background to this unfamiliar but interesting method. Even in non-Muslim
countries, micro-finance practitioners may be able to learn something from it.
Micro-enterprise finance is indeed 'a new world', as
the title of a recent book on the subject suggests, and recent experience
suggests that many of the problems involved in providing financial services to
poor people have been, or are at least near to being solved. Numerous examples,
from many different countries, and using a wide variety of methodologies,
demonstrate that it is possible to lend poor people the very small amounts of
money they need, without tangible security, at times and in places that are
convenient to them, and at a price that the borrowers can afford and which also
makes the operation sustainable.
The dramatic advances that have been achieved,
however, should not blind us to the fact that not all the problems have been
solved, even by the fastest growing and most profitable programmes.
Two very serious weaknesses affect even the most successful
micro-enterprise programmes, and are in a sense
endemic, in that existing methodologies offer no real prospect for their
solution.
The first is the problem of individual failure. Some people's enterprises
are bound to fail; many group based programmes have
insurance funds of some kind, either formal, informal or both, to cover losses,
but these are usually only available in cases of extreme hardship. For most
poor people, business failure means the loss of livelihood and of the only
capital which the owner possessed, If the money was borrowed, the owner is left
with the additional burden of a debt, with no apparent means of repayment. This
danger of course discourages many poor people from borrowing, and it also
discourages financial institutions from lending to the poor; they do not wish
to be in the position of having to demand repayment from people who have lost
their livelihood.
The second problem, that of
inflation, damages the lender rather than the borrowers. Otero and Rhyne state that the final level of self-sufficiency of
institutions providing financial services to micro-enterprises is only reached
when the income covers: "the real cost of funds, loan loss reserves,
operations and inflation". (Otero M and Rhyne E, Eds., 1994, page 18).
The BRI Unit Desa programme in Indonesia is one of the very few, and perhaps
the only, large scale microcredit programme
which can be said to be self sufficient by this rigourous
standard; it barely qualifies as micro-credit, however, since the average loan
size is $500, and there are around three times as many savers as borrowers; its
profitability in part depends, in fact, on its success in generating a large
cash flow surplus which can be invested elsewhere in the economy.
Other smaller programmes,
operating in less dynamic economies, are far further from self-sufficiency, and
the issue of inflation is rarely mentioned; it is difficult enough to envisage
all the other costs being covered. Even an annual inflation rate as low as six
per cent halves the value of a fund in about ten years, and many countries are
likely to suffer from far higher rates than this, for many years; inflation
cannot be treated as a temporary phenomenon, and its effect on sustainability
must be taken into account on a long term basis.
If a programme in a country
with a high rate of inflation depends on clients' savings to fund a significant
proportion of its lending, inflation will of course erode the value of their
savings. Poor people are often willing to continue making deposits with commercial
banks, in spite of the fact that the value of
their earlier deposits has been eroded much faster than the interest
payments have increased them, the total fund may retain its value in spite of
inflation. A financial institution for micro-enterprises should not aim to
survive on this basis, even if it could, and if any outside money is involved,
as capitalisation grants or loans, the problem of
inflation remains.
The two problems of the dual burden on those whose
enterprises fail, and of covering inflation, are thus largely unresolved by the familiar
micro-enterprise methodologies.
Venture capital offers an alternative source of risk finance
for new and growing businesses; the investor shares in the profits, if any, but
he also shares the losses; the entrepreneur is usually allocated a greater
share of the ownership of the business than his cash investment would justify,
in recognition of his management contribution. If the venture fails, however,
he does not have to repay the venture capitalist; the double burden problem is
avoided, and the returns of the more successful venture capital funds have also
more than covered the loss in purchasing power resulting from inflation.
Institutional venture capital, however, has
traditionally only been available for rather large investments. Since there is
no security, the investor has to appraise the venture far more critically than
for a secured interest-bearing loan, and he may also wish to play some part in
its on-going management. This is uneconomic even for most small businesses;
micro-enterprises are quite beyond the scope of this form of investment.
There is however one rather different and rather
unfamiliar approach to financial systems which may at least have the potential
to be applied to small enterprises and to solve the both the problem of the
double burden of failure, and the problem of inflation; this paper attempts to summarise its historical background and to describe some
contemporary applications.
The World Development Report 1989 (World Bank, 1989,
p.88) refers briefly to Sharia or Islamic credit
systems as an 'an interesting contrast' to traditional interest-based banking,
but it also suggests that particular difficulties are likely to arise if they
are applied to small businesses. It may be that 'Western' bankers have
considered these approaches to banking as being necessarily associated with
Islam, and thus irrelevant in a non-Islamic context, but if Sharia
finance is examined as a form of venture capital, rather than as an ideological
imperative, we can possibly learn a great deal from it.
Muhammad was a successful trader for many years before
he became a prophet, and capital for his ventures was provided on a profit or
loss sharing basis by a wealthy widow, Khadijah, who
later became his wife. She shared not
only in the financing but also in the mangement of
the business, and she might even be considered as the first documented woman
entrepreneur.
Trade, with its associated risks, was fundamental to
the economy of Arabia, since communities tended not to be self-sufficient and
they depended on the movement of goods over large distances, in difficult and
dangerous terrain, which required substantial risk capital. The Koran indeed
commends trade (Surah 2, verse 198), and defines the
poor,(ibid., verse 273) as those need alms because
they 'cannot travel in the land for trade'.
The Koran also deals quite explicitly with a number of
economic and financial
issues. Money is seen not as the property of individuals, nor of the state, but as belonging to the community at
large. Idle funds are subject to swingeing taxes for
the benefit of the poor, so that people are encouraged to put their money to
work by investing it in productive ventures, and the rules for inheritance are
designed to preserve wealth within the wider family but also to prevent
concentration in too few hands. (Afif
A Tabbarah, 1978, pp. 330-336).
The Koran gives very detailed guidance as to the
necessity for written business contracts, duly witnessed, (Surah
2, verse 282) and it also specifically
prohibits usury, in several different contexts (see for example Surah 2, verse 275, Surah 3,
verse 130, and Surah 30, verse 39).
There are a number of reasons why usury, or riba, is forbidden. It is said to be wrong because the
lender is seen merely to be exploiting other peoples' needs, since he does not
share the work or the risk, but gains his reward nevertheless, and the setting
of fixed interest rates is seen as implying ability to forecast the future.
Because the future is not under our control, this implication is perceived as
being wrong.
Opinions differ, as they do in other contexts, as to
whether ''usury' refers to excessive interest charges, or to the very principle
of lending money for a fixed and certain return. Within Islam there are two
views on this, which have been characterised as the
'modernist' and the 'conservative' views (Karsten I.,1982, p.56), According to the modernist view, reasonable
interest charges are permitted, whereas the conservative view holds that any
kind of fixed interest is wrong. In any case, although fixed interest banking
is practised in many Islamic countries, there is also
a complete alternative system, which conforms to Sharia
law, and which has recently been applied with some success to small enterprise
lending.
There are several forms of Sharia
credit; the most widely used is known as Murabaha.
Under this system, the client specifies the asset for which he needs finance,
and the banker then purchases it and resells it at an agreed profit to the
client. The client repays the banker in agreed instalments,
over time, and the profit compensates the banker for the loss of use of the
money and the risk of non-repayment. There is no specific interest charge, but
in effect murabaha is clearly little different from
an interest bearing loan.
Our concern, however, is with what is called Musharaka, or partnership credit, which is very close to
venture capital. Under this system, the banker contributes a certain proportion
of the investment required for a given venture, and he agrees with the
entrepreneur as to the
distribution of the profits. They agree on the wage, if any, to
which the entrepreneur will be entitled as a cost of the venture, to be
deducted from the revenue along with the other expenses, and they agree that a
certain share of the profits, usually between 20% and 30%, will be allocated to
the entrepreneur for his management, or entrepreneurship. The balance of the
profit is then split in the same proportion as the original investment.
This form of partnership is ideally suited for single
time-bound ventures, such as investments in trading expeditions such as those
which Muhammad undertook in partnership with Khadijah,
or in seasonal crops, which can be totally liquidated when they are completed.
In such cases the banker may contribute all the working capital, including the
farmer's wages, while the farmer contributes his land and the depreciation of
any equipment that is used.
Musharaka can also be adopted for continuing businesses. the partners agree on the share of the profits to be
allocated to the entrepreneur for his management, and the balance is split in
the same proportion as their respective investments. The entrepreneur also
agrees to buy
out the banking partner over an agreed period, by paying a certain percentage
of the original investment each year, and the banker receives a smaller
proportion of the profits each year, as his share decreases.
There are a number of variants of both murabaha and musharaka
investment, but the principles are fundamentally the same. Murabaha
is close to the Western concept of hire purchase, which is of course a very
important source of capital for fixed asset purchases by small business people,
but Musharaka represents something quite new; the
methodology and spirit of venture capital are applied by main stream commercial
bankers for the benefit of small enterprises.
Since the amount of money recovered by each partner is
based on a proportion of the profits actually earned, and is not fixed in
monetary terms when the agreement is made, it is automatically adjusted for
inflation. This does not of course apply to the repayments of the banker's
investments which are made in declining partnerships, but in small enterprises
at any rate the annual profits are usually well in excess of the original
investment, so that this compensates for the lack of inflation indexing. If
there are no profits to share, the banker gets nothing, and the operating
partner is therefore not burdened with a debt in case of failure. If the risks
are correctly calculated by the banker, his losses from failures will be met by
his share of the profits earned by successful enterprises.
Sudan provides one of the world's harshest testing
grounds for any form of economic initiative. The general economic performance
has been among the worst in the world. GNP per head declined by 22% in real terms between
1966 and 1986, the richest 10% of the population increased their share of
national income from 32% to 36%, and the share of the poorest 40% declined from
16% to 12% over a ten year period. Inflation ran at an annual average rate of 160%
in 1980s; current performance is if anything worse. (Friedrich Ebert Foundation
and Faculty of Economics, Gezira University, 1990)
Sudan is also a country in which Islamic law, or Sharia, has come to be enforced in many fields, so that
there is a strong incentive for banks to adopt Islamic banking methods. This is
not only politically expedient, but it is also good marketing, since many of
the people, and particularly the poor, adhere strictly to Sharia
themselves; they are reluctant to borrow money, or to deposit their
savings, on 'Western' interest-based
terms.
The two major sectoral
development banks, the Industrial Bank of Sudan and the Agricultural Bank of
Sudan, have provided very little finance for smaller enterprises or farmers,
and they have relied mainly on 'administrative charges' as a replacement for interest.
A relatively small number of large farmers and industrialists have benefited
from large loans of this kind which have often been invested in
capital-intensive imported technology; the banks themselves have become largely
inactive because of accumulated losses and inflation.
Most commercial banks, such as the Sudanese Savings
Bank, have confined their assistance to smaller enterprises, which has been
very limited in any case, to murabaha, or purchase
and re-sale operations, because this form of banking is relatively simple and
understandable to their staff, who have mainly been trained in Western banking
methods, and, since the bank holds a lien over the asset until it is paid for,
it appears relatively secure.
One exception, however, has been the Sudanese Islamic
Bank (SIB). This is the largest commercial bank in Sudan with twenty million
dollars paid up capital, 72% of which is locally owned. This organisation, as its name implies, has always operated on
Islamic principles; their earlier operations with smaller enterprises were
mainly carried out on the basis of murabaha, or
purchase and resale. In 1987, for instance, the bank collaborated with the
Dutch government in the supply of 150,000 chicks to one thousand small farmers;
these were bought by the bank, and re-sold at a profit which covered the bank's
transaction costs.
The SIB has in recent years been moving more towards
partnership financing, partly because of the continuing high inflation rate in
Sudan. The proportion of their investments which were made on the basis of musharaka rose from
43% in 1986 to 61% in 1987, and an increasing proportion of this investment is
being directed towards smaller enterprises. (Muhammad Uthman Khaleefa, Salah Eddin Alshazali
Ibrahim, 1988). This is in marked contrast to
other Islamic banks; in Iran, for instance, partnership investments only made
up 31% of the total disbursements made by the banks in 1986, and the proportion
was more or less unchanged from the previous year.(Khan
BA and Prodhan B, 1992, p. 12)
A typical short term trade partnership was between the
bank and a small trader who purchased sesame seed and re-sold it after four
months. The arrangement stipulated that the trader would take 25% of the
eventual profit for his management; the balance of the profit was to be
distributed on the same proportion as the partners' original investment. In the
event the bank made a return of 45% on its investment, on an annualised basis, while the trader made 108%, including his
management share.
Musharaka is also ideal for financing seasonal agriculture. In
a typical case, the bank entered into a partnership with 14 farmers in Karari, near Khartoum, to grow potatoes. The bank provided
71% of the finance, much of it in kind through the use of tractors and pumps,
and the cost of land clearance and inputs, while the farmers provided the
balance of 29% of the investment. It was agreed in this case that the farmers
would receive 75% of the final profits, in recognition of their management
input and the use of their land, while 25% of the profit would go to the SIB.
In the event the bank earned a nominal return of 53% on its investment, on an annualised basis, while the farmers earned 494% on their
contribution.
Sudan is a shortage economy, where access to inputs such
as those provided by the SIB in this case is very difficult for individual
farmers or others. The bank's contribution in kind, which may be made through
its own subsidiary farm contracting business,
is thus particularly valuable, because it might otherwise be impossible
for the farmers to obtain these resources even if they did have the money. The
SIB is also able through its involvement in the actual operation to maintain
contact, and thus to have some idea of the final yield and the profit. Like any
partnership, musharaka depends on a degree of trust
between the partners, but such contact is nevertheless valuable.
The SIB can also finance post harvest storage and
marketing of crops, under separate musharaka
partnerships. In the case of sorghum, for instance, the SIB pays the farmer 50%
of the usually very low market price at the time of harvest. The farmer stores
the whole crop, under the supervision of the bank, and when it is sold at an
agreed date for a higher price the bank first recovers the down payment it made
to the farmer. The farmer then receives 50% of the net profit for his
management, and the balance remaining is split equally between the bank and the
farmer.
This provides a reasonable profit to the bank, and the
combined arrangement enables the farmer to retain a far higher proportion of
the value of his crop than he received under the traditional informal 'shail' system, whereby private traders provide an advance
at planting time in return for the right to purchase the whole crop at harvest,
for a price even lower than the market rate at that time. (Khalifa and Khalifa Consultants,
1988. Muhammad Hashim Awad,
1992, Muhammad Uthman Khaleefa,
1990).
On-going small enterprises, as opposed to seasonal
farming or trading ventures, usually need some element of fixed capital, and in
these cases musharaka partnerships can include a
prior agreement on a diminishing partnership as previously described. The
operating partner buys out the bank's share over an agreed period of say five
years, for the face value of original investment; the balance of the profits of
the business is shared in proportion to the reduced share of ownership. When
the full amount of the fixed capital has been repaid, the operating partner
retains all the profit and has no further obligation to the bank.
This approach also has potential for small-scale
non-farm enterprises, although the variety of different types of activity
involved is likely to prevent the bank from being actually involved in the
business as it is with some agricultural ventures. In 1992 the Bank established
a special branch in one of the poorer areas of Omdurman,
the original capital of Sudan which is in fact much larger than Khartoum, the
adjacent colonial capital on the other side of the River Nile. The population
of Omdurman has been enormously increased in recent
years by the influx of refugees from internal and foreign warfare, and by
people who have left rural areas because of long periods of drought.
This first specialist branch, known as 'The Productive
Families Branch', has been opened because the Bank wishes to serve these
people, in order both to reach a new and profitable market and to fulfil its social obligations. A further branch of this
kind has already been opened in Wad Medani, to the
South of Khartoum, and the Bank has also decided to open five similar branches
in other parts of the capital and elsewhere, because of the success of the initial experiment.
The branch was established at in January 1992; after
one year its financial position was approximately as follows: (the figures are expressed in
US dollars converted at an approximation of the rate prevailing in January
1993; any form of conversion involves a compromise between totally unrealistic
'official' rates and widely varying unofficial figures)
|
|
Assets |
Liabilities |
|
|
Partnership Investments |
US$54 000 |
Customer Depositis |
US$176 000 |
|
Other investments |
US$56 000 |
Bank's original investment |
US$16 000 |
|
Furniture & other equipment |
US$16 000 |
|
|
|
Stocks of machinery |
US$65 000 |
|
|
|
Cash |
US$1000 |
|
|
|
Total |
US$$ 192 000 |
Total |
US$ 192 000 |
The 'other investments' are outstanding murabaha or purchase and resale debts. Because the staff were familiar with this form of finance, much of the
early investment was made on this bases, but because of the high and
unpredictable level of inflation, the Bank is now focussing
on musharaka risk sharing partnerships, and few
further purchase and re-sale investments are being made.
The Bank intends this branch to be self-sustaining not
only in terms of earnings but also in terms of matching its deposits with
investments, or credits; the branch has therefore invested the surplus deposits
in sewing machines and other similar items of capital equipment which its
clients use. These will be used in future partnerships, and the bank is
protecting itself and
its clients from inflation by holding its assets in readily marketable
equipment rather than in cash or other financial instruments.
The operations of the branch over its first year can
be summarised as follows:
|
Income from Investments |
US$32 000 |
|
Wages and Salaries |
US$9600 |
|
Rent |
US$2400 |
|
Depreciation |
US$9880 |
|
Total |
US$21 880 |
|
Total Profit of branch |
US$10 120 |
|
80% payable to depositors |
US$8096 |
|
20% retained by Bank |
US$2024 |
The Bank actually invests its own share of the
branch's profits in welfare services in the community, such as health and
education, but this is in the nature of an initial goodwill gesture; the
profits on the Bank's original investment in the branch are considered more
than adequate, particularly in the first year of operation, and it is planned
to extend the experiment more widely in the near future.
The branch is financing about 400 people. Two hundred
and sixty of them are musharaka investment partners, while the remainder
are paying off murabaha debts, and 80% of them are
women. The bank has invested an average of around $150 in each venture. Most of
these partners are also depositors, and there are also two hundred additional
depositors who are not using the bank as a source of finance.
The partners are involved in a typically wide range of
petty urban enterprises; about sixty of them are tailors, and others are
manufacturing processed foodstuffs, soap, shoes, school chalk, cheese and wood
and metal furniture. Yet others are raising goats or poultry, and many other
partners are involved in petty retail trade.
So far, there have been no defaults. This does not
mean, of course, that every business has been a successful investment; since
payments to the Bank by its partners are dependent on business profits, there
is little incentive for the partners to conceal their problems from the bank,
and the danger may be that they may pretend that their results are worse than
they really are. The Bank is directly involved in some of the partnerships,
particularly when they depend on scarce raw materials or other inputs which can
only be accessed on a large scale or through contacts with senior government
officials.
The Bank has a total of ten professional staff, of whom seven are women. This includes three field staff, and
three other customer service staff in the office, who maintain regular contact
with the partners. They keep control accounts for each partnership at the
branch, including those businesses whose owners are illiterate and therefore
maintain no accounts for themselves, and disbursements of working capital are
made only as needed; this ensures that the Bank is kept aware of the current
operations, and it also limits the Bank's exposure if things start to go
seriously wrong.
One typical client of the SIB Omdurman
Productive Families branch started her tailoring business in 1991, with an
investment of approximately three hundred and fifty dollars. The business
prospered, and by 1993 the fixed assets were worth about $1600. She needed more
working capital to finance its expansion, since she was putting out an
increasing proportion of the work to local women, and selling to traders who
also needed credit.
She therefore entered into a partnership with the SIB
under which the bank provided finance up to the same amount as her own capital
of $ 1600; she
was allocated 30% of the profit for her management, and the balance was to be
shared equally with the bank, on the same basis as their respective investments.
Her profits are now averaging about $250 per month; her share of this amounts to a return of about 10% a month on her
investment, while the bank is receiving about 5% a month on its money. (Nawal Adam, 1994) The high, erratic and undocumented
inflation rate means that it is impossible to convert these figures to 'real'
returns, but as the nominal profits increase, so does the return to the
partners. Under these circumstances, no other form of lending would be viable.
It is always easier to give reasons why an unfamiliar
approach is not applicable elsewhere,
than it is to analyse it to identify aspects
that may be transferable, and there are certainly a number of special factors
which have contributed to the initial success of the SIB Productive Families'
branch in Omdurman. It is often difficult in Sudan
for business people to obtain equipment and materials themselves, so that the
bank's involvement goes beyond finance alone, and many of the bank's partners
would have rejected interest-based loans for ideological rather than economic
reasons.
The bank's willingness to share the profits of the
branch with the community may also contribute to the mutual trust between its
staff and the partners which is clearly necessary of this form of financing is
to succeed.
In a sense, however, musharaka
partnerships require no more of the banker, or his customer, than is required
in a genuine business-based relationship, as opposed to one based mainly on
security. If the bank genuinely bases its decision on an appraisal of the
entrepreneur and the earning capacity of his proposed investment, and monitors
the account on a regular basis in order to forestall problems, he will need to
be as familiar with the business as a banker who has invested in a musharaka partnership.
Some undercurrent of antagonism and a desire to do
better than the other partners to a deal is inherent in many business
arrangements, including the relationship between a bank and its customers,
particularly when they are small-scale business people whom the bank regards
prima facie as unprofitable , and who
themselves feel that the bank has little understanding of their position. It
may be that this climate of mistrust is too deep-rooted to allow conventional banks
to adopt any form of partnership financing, in spite of the obvious advantages
of inflation protection and avoiding the necessity of demanding repayment from
people who have already lost their livelihood.
Partnership financing may have more immediate
potential for non-government and community-based financial services. ACORD, an
NGO which has been active in small enterprise development in Sudan for many
years, and has moved from a system based on 'administrative charges', which
were tantamount to interest, to Murabaha purchase and
sale finance in its programmes in Port Sudan and Kassala, is actively considering the possibility of
changing over to Musharaka partnerships. As inflation
continues, and donors increasingly demand 'self-sustainabilty',
this may indeed be the only option for survival of the credit programmes, but it may also offer an opportunity for new
growth and development.
Most new forms of small and micro-enterprise
financing, however, make extensive use of group-based intermediaries. The
members of these groups often contribute to an emergency fund, which can be
used to cover the losses of those whose businesses fail, such as the Loan
Insurance fund to which borrowers from PRIDE in Kenya have to contribute, or
the various group funds required by Grameen Bank in
Bangladesh. Informal savings and credit groups, such as ROSCAs,
also have their own ways of dealing with the problems of those who genuinely
cannot repay. The members of these groups are also familiar with each other's
business operations, because they belong to the same community.
It may therefore be possible to introduce the Musharaka approach to groups of this kind, since it
represents a formalisation of what they already do,
which can help them to protect their funds from erosion through inflation, and
which also absolves them from the need to consider cases of hardship on an
individual basis. Successful community banking depends on open-ness and
sharing; Musharaka financing has what are from the
conventional banker's point of view the same weaknesses, but they may be the
same strengths.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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The new World of Micro-Enterprise Finance, West London, IT Publications, 1994,
World Development Report, 1989,
World Bank, Washington, 1989.
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Limalayin, Beirut 1978.
The Holy Quran, translated
by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall,
Dar Al Kitab Al Masri,
Cairo and Beirut, 1992.
Karsten I., Efforts to develop Islamic Financial Systems:
Focus on the Abolition of the Fixed Interest Rate, IMF Survey, February 1982
Khan BA and Prodhan B,
Islamic Banking, A Survey, Templeton College, Management Research Paper 92/6,
Oxford, 1992
Proceedings of Workshop on the Promotion and
Development of Small and Medium Industries, Friedrich Ebert Foundation and
Faculty of Economics, Gezira University, November
1990
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Financing, SIB Khartoum 1988.
Khalifa and Khalifa
Consultants, The Role of SIB on rural development in the Sudan, Evaluation
Report, Khartoum 1988.
Sayed Abbas, The
Gap in Small Business Finance and Practical Financial Policy in the Sudan. Gezira
University, 1992.
Muhammad Hashim Awad, Community development through poor foussed Islamic Finance, mimeo, Faculty of Economics,
University of Khartoum, 1992.
Nawal Adam, Case Study prepared for Programme
on Empowering Women through Enterprise, Cranfield,
1994.
Muhammad Uthman Khaleefa, Islamic Banking in the Rural Sector, paper
presented at Jakarta seminar organised by Islamic
Bank of Jeddah and Govt of Indonesia, 1990