Oscar Javier Rivera Jimenez stands on the corrugated steel roof of his warehouse and surveys the urban wasteland around him. “We constructed all of this with the money from Compartamos,” he says. “Before, there was nothing. We built it ourselves. That made it possible. And the help of God as well, which is the secret of everything.”

Compartamos is Latin America's biggest provider of micro-finance – small loans aimed at budding entrepreneurs, targeted at areas of severe poverty.