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> Posted by Kelley Mesa
ACCION International President and CEO Maria Otero will be live today on the BBC World Service’s radio program “World, Have Your Say” from 1:00-2:00pm (6-7pm GMT), discussing the commercial approach to microfinance with Muhammad Yunus. The show “What can the Rich World Banks Learn from the Poor?” can be heard worldwide.
To listen live, or to phone in with your comments, please go here: www.worldhaveyoursay.com
To call in on-air, dial +44 20 70 83 72 72 ; to text the show, dial +44 77 86 20 60 80 . To email, it’s
> Posted by Kelley Mesa
Elisabeth Rhyne will be a guest on the Kojo Nnamdi Show today from 1-2pm Eastern Time. The topic is microcredit – what it is, how/if it has been affected by the economic downturn and what lessons we (in the USA) can learn from microcredit.
Kojo Nnamdi’s show is LIVE, with listener call-in and live streaming from their website. Listen in from your desks!
Kojo Nnamdi Show
http://www.wamu.org/kojo
http://www.kojoshow.org
88.5 FM in Washington, DC
> Posted by Micol Pistelli
This is a guest posting by Micol Pistelli, Manager of Social Performance Standards at the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX).
Micol Pistelli
Measuring financial performance is a natural piece of any organization’s self-evaluation and goal setting, and the measures of such performance have been pretty well defined.
Most microfinance providers, however, pursue a double bottom line: strong financial performance, of course, but ultimately in the service of a social mission. The development of ways to measure that social performance – a framework of comparable, standardized data analogous to the financial performance framework – has been the focus since 2005 of a global industry-wide Social Performance Task Force.
But how does one begin to measure this second “bottom line”?
Last week, MIX distributed The Social Performance Standards Report to more than 900 MFIs . MIX created the report to collect information on the 22 core indicators selected by the Social Performance Task Force.
Spanish and French versions of the report go out this week.
In order to make it into the report, indicators had to be:
- relevant,
- easy for the MFI to obtain,
- easy to verify,
- not confidential for the MFI Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Kelley Mesa
Check out the latest Center podcast on housing microfinance. The second in the series on business solutions to housing microfinance, in this podcast David Levai speaks with Willie Vos, managing director of SouthNet Cygnus. A branch of the South African property developer SouthNet, SouthNet Cygnus is a residential-property developer focusing on the lower-income groups of South Africa. They have taken a unique approach to solving the housing problems at the bottom of the pyramid, integrating differing components of the housing value chain by bringing together not only developers and financiers, but municipal stakeholders and services.
> Posted by David Levai
Today, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and this trend is not about to change. Among those urban dwellers in the developing world, more than a third lives in a slum or extremely precarious conditions. But numerous socially minded individuals are uncovering new ways to provide decent quality homes at affordable costs to low-income populations – helping small property owners become landlords, providing standardized housing units in recycled shipping containers, lending building material for self-improvements, etc.
In late 2008, fourteen participants invited by the Center for Financial Inclusion and ACCION Global Investments gathered in Washington, DC, with two goals in mind – to dissect the bottlenecks in the provision of affordable housing to the bottom of the pyramid in emerging markets and to identify innovative private-sector-driven solutions.
Representing India, South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, Bolivia, and the United States, these practitioners confronted their analyses of the hurdles in reaching scale and quality in housing finance for the poor as well as their vision going forward. The profiles of the attendees were varied Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Mr. Provocative
Looking through the mail yesterday, I came across a credit card application addressed to my teenage stepdaughter, who recently turned 18. It was one of the first in an avalanche of such offerings for financial services she will receive this year, indeed for the rest of her life. The seductive promise of the first credit card is a rite of passage into young adulthood and one fraught with untold risk for this generation of Americans – notwithstanding the fact that banks, and the financial services they provide, have led to phenomenal wealth creation and the most successful property-owning democracy in history.
This got me to pondering the extent of my stepdaughter’s financial literacy and her readiness to make a thoughtful evaluation of this and other such offerings. She certainly hasn’t received it from me. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I have never learned how to balance a checkbook or read and comprehended the boilerplate on my credit card statements.)
Sadly, my ignorance of the financial basics is hardly aberrant and may even be closer to the norm, as a little research quickly indicated. According to Niall Ferguson, author of the new book, The Ascent of Money Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Kelley Mesa
Center Managing Director Elisabeth Rhyne is the featured speaker in the 2008-09 Weissberg Residency of Beloit College’s Weissberg Program in International Studies.
The Weissberg Professorship in International Studies, established in 1999, provides an on-campus residency each year for a distinguished individual who has made an important contribution to international understanding. It is designed to enrich the global perspective and international education programs at Beloit and allows for an extended period of exchange and interaction with respected active “players” on the international stage as they examine some of the key issues of our time.
This year is also the 10th anniversary of the Weissberg Program in International Studies. Events include a weeklong program from March 23-28 featuring practitioners implementing microfinance programs around the world as a means for empowering the poor to improve the economic and social health of their families and communities.
For more information: http://www.beloit.edu/oie/campus_internat/elisabeth_rhyne.html
> Posted by Brian Cox
This is a guest post by Brian Cox, executive director of Microfinance Currency Risk Solutions. MFX Solutions is the result of a collaborative effort to address the growing problem of currency risk in the microfinance industry. To learn more, visit their website at www.mfxsolutions.com.
Dear friends and stakeholders of MFX Solutions:
Happy New Year from all of us at MFX (something I can now say without having to invoke the royal We). I wanted give you a short update on our progress and introduce our new management team.
We remain on track to launch operations in early spring. The last piece of the puzzle for MFX to become fully operational is securing our OPIC guarantee. When that is finalized, we will make our investment in TCX and open our doors for business as the first currency hedging facility designed exclusively for microfinance. Our initial capital will allow us to hedge roughly $40M in microfinance loans through swaps and forwards in most emerging and developing market currencies.
MFX also recently secured a new $200,000 grant to support our educational program. we will be building a new web-based interactive tool for MFI managers to help them quantify their currency risk and compare hard and local currency funding options. We will look for partners who can help disseminate Read the rest of this entry »
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