SKS Microfinance, an Indian company that makes small loans to poor people, went public this week — sparking a debate about whether its obligations as a publicly traded company will take it away from its antipoverty mission.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and widely recognized as the father of microfinance, told the Associated Press that SKS’s IPO was “pushing microfinance in the loan-sharking direction.” 

“It’s not mission drift,” he said. “It’s endangering the whole mission.”

Mr. Yunus said he was “repulsed” by the message he believes the microfinance company is sending — that it can make money from the poor.

Matthew Bishop, co-author of the book Philanthrocapitalism: How Giving Can Save the World, has a different view. 

Mr. Bishop describes the experience of the for-profit Mexican microfinance institution Compartamos; he says it has almost certainly been able to grow more quickly as a company than if it had remained a nonprofit group. That growth has meant more credit for Mexican borrowers who would otherwise have to turn to “real — i.e., nasty — loan sharks,” says Mr. Bishop.

Meanwhile, Timothy Ogden, publisher of Philanthropy Action, says the debate about whether SKS’s IPO is good or bad is a distraction from a more important discussion, raised not only by the Indian company’s public offering but also by the recent news that Unitus, a Seattle microfinance group, was declaring “mission accomplished” and changing its focus.

Writes Mr. Ogden: “In the two organizations we are for the first time, I believe, seeing what the endgame for social entrepreneurship can look like.”

Both SKS and Unitus succeeded by most reasonable measures, says Mr. Ogden, enabling their founders to make money from that success.

The ability for people to “do well” by “doing good” raises some thorny questions, he writes. Among them: What responsibility do the people who took charitable donations have once they start to earn money from their ventures?

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