The provision of financial services to individuals living in poverty has challenged development practice for years. From institutional lending to the front door of poverty, with the assumption that a door is present, microfinance has enlarged the debate around economic participation with the poor. With the United Nations' Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the World Bank's $1.08PPP (1993), a day measure of poverty, it has been argued, “there is a good international consensus for the alleviation of basic suffering through humanitarian and development assistance” (Johnston 2010: 235). However, how does microfinance appropriate new ways to think about who we are and prepare people to live and work in emerging geographies of time and place?

Banking and money lending in Myanmar (also referred to as Burma) is coupled with an unprecedented display of ascendency and quietude. This text is an intentional exploration into the contribution of interpretive theory within Myanmar's nascent microfinance schemes and the appropriation of these schemes on the ground. This text introduces a Micro-narrative model for the appropriation of projects and suggests Ontological Economic Capacity (OEC) coupled with existing Social Performance mechanisms as a measurement within livelihood projects.

The research protocol is guided by the critical hermeneutic tradition (Geertz 1973; 1983, Ricoeur 1977; 1992; 2004, Kearney 1998; 2002; 2004) as applied by Herda (1999; 2010). The research categories used to guide this intentional exploration include Paul Ricoeur's (1992) Narrative Identity, Richard Kearney's (1998; 2004) Imagination, and Martin Heidegger's (1971; 1999) concepts of poetry, language, and thought in Appropriation.

The narratives from my conversation partners, text analysis, and research findings show that there is an increasing need for assessment within the rapidly expanding market of microfinance. This reality is even more pertinent for the projects in Myanmar with the increasing privatization of industry, extreme poverty, and broken banking system. Financial inclusion has drawn the attention of corporate community banking to commercialized microfinance institutions (MFIs) and local project participants in many geographical locations. This research seeks to provide a platform for a financial anthropology and the contribution of ontology, the doctrine of being (Heidegger 1999: 1), to further explore the intersection of people and finance. “The great ship of economic and social development may have started to change course, but there is still a long way to go” (Johnston 2010: 234).