Pram Tor is a farmer in northwest Cambodia.
He's 40 years old.
He and his wife have three kids.
He grows vegetables like curly cabbage and wax gourd that he harvests by hand.
He rents a plot of land from the government and he grows vegetables.
And his wife sells those vegetables on the local market.
Our colleague Gabriel Steinhauser went to meet him near his farm in Batambang province.
A few years ago, Pram Tor and his family wanted to expand their small farm.
The hope was that they ultimately could start earning more money.
So he took out a loan from a local lender.
He took a first loan of $1,000 to sort of, you know,
buy some farming inputs and just sort of increase his yield.
He thought, I can earn more money and, you know, like kind of make a better life for my family.
The monthly payments were manageable, and he was able to pay the loan back easily.
And that small loan of $1,000 helped grow his business.
The perfect definition of microfinance and what it was supposed to do.
Microfinance was created to provide small loans to poor people in developing countries.
The idea is to allow people to pull themselves up by the bootstraps,
to lend them money so they can start businesses, become entrepreneurs.
That's the way it was supposed to work.