Customers at Whole Foods may have noticed new decorations adorning the registers a while ago: photographs of smiling inhabitants of poor countries. This is the work of the Whole Planet Foundation, the grocery store’s philanthropic arm, which is running its eighth annual “prosperity campaign” to achieve a “future without poverty.” Shoppers can donate their bag credits — the five-cent rebate they receive by forgoing plastic bags — to a microfinance fund.

Combining this with traditional donations, Whole Foods hopes to raise $5 million to fund forty thousand small loans to “impoverished entrepreneurs” around the globe. They say that these direct financial transfers, unmediated by government agencies, can “empower the poor and the communities around them.”

In many ways, this is the age of the micro, of thinking small and acting locally. Microloans are only one part of the broad move toward “bottom-up” development, which seeks to enroll the poor directly in anti-poverty campaigns.