The shoemaker in Turkey, the potato seller in Vietnam, and the weaver in Bolivia are among the billions of low-income entrepreneurs who make the world go round. They are also the type of people who can benefit significantly from microfinance. Every year, the Consultative Group To Assist The Poor (or CGAP) hosts a photo contest asking entrants to submit photos based around the idea of microfinance.The purpose of the contest is to give amateur and professional photographers a chance to show the different ways that poor households manage their financial lives and make their lives better through financial inclusion. Photo: South Asia Regional Winner – “Bricks Worker”, Bangladesh. A private enterprise worker is working at a brick field. These small businesses are creating new job opportunities for many poor people. (Photo by Moksumul Haque)

Revellers chat on Havana's Malecon seafront before performing at a carnival parade, Cuba, August 12, 2016. (Photo by Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)

A photograph of Cuba's former President Fidel Castro decorates a wall inside a state-run market in Havana, March 8, 2016. (Photo by Alexandre Meneghini/Reuters)

Palestinians stand near a damaged vehicle, near the site where a number of Palestinians were killed in an Israeli raid, in Jenin, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on March 11, 2025. (Photo by Raneen Sawafta/Reuters)

Freya Smith aged three, leads one of Erth’s giant dinosaur puppets across the road on August 6, 2019 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Australian theatre company Erth presents their best-selling show Dinosaur’s Zoo as part of Underbelly’s Fringe programme. Featuring giant dinosaur puppets which walk, roar and blink like the real thing, Dinosaur’s Zoo is a perfect example of edutainment for children of all ages, taking place at the McEwan Hall every day of the Fringe at 11am. (Photo by Jeff J. Mitchell/Getty Images)

Storks casts shadows as they search for food on the dried-up Lake May in southwest Turkey on October 30, 2021. (Photo by Seyit Konyal/Solent News)

A woman applies lipstick in a car that is parked at a beach facing a volcanic rock called Devil's Finger outside Yuzhno-Kurilsk, the main settlement on the Southern Kurile island of Kunashir September 15, 2015. Russian residents of the island chain at the centre of a dispute between Japan and Russia that has held up a treaty to formally end World War Two hope a diplomatic solution will lure tourists and investment to help refurbish rickety infrastructure. The Southern Kuriles are referred to in Japan as the Northern Territories. (Photo by Thomas Peter/Reuters)

A cat sits in front of a retro car owned by retired mechanic Mikhail Krasinets at an open-air museum of Soviet-era vehicles in the village of Chernousovo, Tula region, Russia on September 27, 2018. In the remote village of Chernousovo, retired mechanic Mikhail Krasinets tends to more than 300 ramshackle, Soviet-era cars, remnants of a once vibrant auto industry that crumbled with the fall of the Soviet Union. (Photo by Maxim Shemetov/Reuters)