Referring to a microcredit project for women created by the Credit Mutuel of Senegal, this article shows that a partnership between a financial institution and an organisation of proximity can be a way to make a micocredit system financially viable and accessible to the poor. The costs can be limited, the risks shared and most of all the risks can become 'endogeneous'. From the point of view of
... [Show full abstract] personal motives and individual strategies, the principle incentive mechanism is a relation of confidence, and this confidence springs from an endogeneous process of apprenticeship. In order to understand the forms of confidence on which the project is based, we may distinguish two types of confidence: a confidence of security, which springs from a relationship of proximity, whether it be spatial, social, religious, etc., and a confidence of 'hierarchic' type, which uses the charisma of leaders whose social, economic, political success became a model for their society.
