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> Posted by Alex Counts
The following post was originally published on the Grameen Foundation Insights Blog.
When I sat down with Larry Reed a few weeks back and learned of the significant changes in store for the Microcredit Summit Campaign, two decades of memories were stirred up. I tried to imagine what the world would be like had the original Microcredit Summit not taken place and even more important, if the Campaign that followed it had been stillborn or less robust.
That world would be one with fewer people having access to financial services, especially among the poorest, and thousands of ideas, debates, partnerships and personal connections grounded in ensuring that those financial services made a positive, lasting impact on the lives of the poor would have been lost.
It would also be a less inclusive and just world, one where civil society’s role at the global level in encouraging governments and the private sector to adopt, adapt and support the best ideas might still be nascent. Indeed, one of the most powerful legacies of the Campaign is the role of citizen’s movements in pushing governments and businesses worldwide to get behind action on climate change. In fact, the advocacy model pioneered by the Campaign’s scrappy mother organization, RESULTS, has been applied with stunning success to combat global warming through Citizens’ Climate Lobby and Citizens’ Climate Education, whose board of directors I recently joined.
> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
It’s important to recognize the work of others, but so easy to let the days slide by silently – until a major transition occurs.
Last week there was such a transition, in the form of a gala to recognize the achievements of Alex Counts, founder and for 18 years, CEO of Grameen Foundation. So I decided to mark the occasion with these thoughts.
The story of the organization’s founding is a simple one, reflecting the naiveté and boldness of youth. As a recent college graduate, Alex moved to Bangladesh to apprentice at the Grameen Bank. On returning home to the U.S. seven years later, in 1997, and with $6,000 provided by Muhammad Yunus, he started the Foundation to carry Grameen Bank’s work for the very poor into countries around the world. He didn’t know what he didn’t know, as is the case for most entrepreneurs, social and otherwise. Grameen Foundation operated on a shoestring in those early days.
Over the next 18 years, Alex built an organization that today works in Asia, Africa and Latin America with a multimillion dollar budget and a high-powered board of directors (just a little self-promotion – I’m honored to be a member). Grameen Foundation has assisted some of the best and most mission-driven microfinance institutions in the world – Fonkoze, Grameen Koota, Cashpor, CARD Bank and many more – to raise money, improve their operations and try new things, with a constant eye on serving the very poor and the least-included, especially women. The Foundation was an early entrant into what is now the Fintech space, with the MIFOS initiative and the Grameen Technology Center, and it has become an important innovator in the use of mobile phones as a tool in support of the financial, agricultural and health needs of the poor.
But that’s not why I’m writing this post. I wanted to recognize Alex from a more personal point of view.
> Posted by Alex Counts, Founder, Grameen Foundation
I have written extensively about how I believe practitioners and researchers can work most effectively together in reducing poverty, often using some of the missed opportunities for this kind of collaboration in microfinance as a point of departure. In the process, quite a few people have come to believe that I am opposed to randomized controlled trials (RCTs). Perhaps part of the issue is the tendency of many people, especially those in the media, to reduce a point of view to whether it is “for” or “against” something else.
In fact, my position has always been that RCTs have an important place in improving development policy and practice. I have, however, been uneasy with the way they have been promoted – dare I say “over-hyped”? – as a “gold standard” and also with the misleading assumptions and comparisons some of its proponents routinely make. The limitations of RCTs are frequently minimized, as are the potential contributions of other research methodologies.
In the case of microcredit, the way RCT studies have been digested, interpreted, and acted upon has done considerable and unnecessary damage to policy and practice, even as it has increased our knowledge of some important issues. No one group bears responsibility for this damage, but too many continue to ignore or minimize it.
Enter Angus Deaton
Like many others, I have struggled at times to articulate the source of my unease. Now comes powerful commentary on RCTs and related topics by 2015 Nobel laureate economist Professor Angus Deaton in his interview with Tim Ogden of NYU’s Financial Access Initiative.
> Posted by Alex Counts, President and CEO of Grameen Foundation, and Co-Chair of the Microfinance CEO Working Group
The Microfinance CEO Working Group, as part of its commitment to client protection in microfinance and financial inclusion, set out in early 2014 to develop a model law that could be adapted, in whole or in part, into different national contexts. The Working Group’s partners were the global law firm DLA Piper and its “Council of Microfinance Counsels” which is composed of the in-house counsels of all Working Group members. After 15 months of effort, the first version of this law has now been completed and released. The blog below describes this tool and how it can be used.
Those who set policy for consumer protection in financial inclusion have a powerful new tool at their disposal, one that financial inclusion practitioners, legal experts, and regulators have had a hand in creating.
Over recent months, the law firm DLA Piper/New Perimeter has been working with the Microfinance CEO Working Group and a subgroup of the Council of Microfinance Counsels to prepare the Model Law and Commentary for Financial Consumer Protection. This is a framework of suggested legislation on financial consumer protection based on the Client Protection Principles as promoted by the Smart Campaign. The seven Client Protection Principles set standards that clients should expect to receive when doing business with a microfinance institution, and cover such critical areas as transparency, fair and respectful treatment, privacy, and prevention of over-indebtedness. The team that developed this studied multiple countries that had the most progressive and effective laws related to client protection in financial services, and in other areas.
The Model Law can be used in a variety of ways.
> Posted by Alex Counts, President and CEO, Grameen Foundation
The following post was originally published on the Grameen Foundation blog and presented at the ‘Financial Services for the Poor: Lessons and Implications of the Latest Research on Credit’ event hosted by CGAP, IPA, J-PAL, and The World Bank on February 27, 2015.
I would like to start by congratulating the researchers involved in these six new studies, as they add to the body of knowledge about microcredit and microfinance that has been accumulating for several decades, and has made us a stronger industry as a result. I would also like to congratulate the organizers of this event, and thank them for inviting me to share my views, as a representative of Grameen Foundation and the Microfinance CEO Working Group, which I co-chair with Mary Ellen Iskendarian of Women’s World Banking.
I actually find these studies encouraging. The frame I use to digest them is this: what do they tell us about what microcredit is accomplishing, and about what it can accomplish. Somehow, the main frame people seem to be using to interpret these results is what microcredit does not do. I don’t think that frame is appropriate, nor helpful.
I think that we can all agree that while microcredit has been “transformative” for individual clients, it is not today “transformative” for the average client, especially in the time frames that are being studied. I presume we can all also agree that microcredit has not cured cancer, nor the common cold. But why use unrealistic standards to frame the discussion?
> Posted by Alex Counts, President and CEO, Grameen Foundation
With increasing regularity, I hear people talking about a new concept: deploying funds to earn profit while at the same time solving complex social and environmental problems, also known as impact investing. One article that stood out for me, and in fact prompted me to write this, is “Good Investments” by Dan Morrell in the Harvard Business School Alumni Bulletin. At one point the author writes: “What impact investing really needs, all agree, are pioneers.”
Impact investing advocates can sometimes give the impression that they have “outsmarted poverty” (and other societal problems) by discovering the need for this profit-making approach, one that allows high net worth individuals to further increase their assets while also having (in the words of another impact investor quoted in the HBS article) a “fabulous social impact.”
Count me as someone who does not feel that what “impact investing” needs now are “pioneers” per se. Rather, it needs pragmatic, risk-taking, deeply curious, and disciplined people with access to funding who can work collaboratively to move an old idea forward, bearing in mind the lessons of the past and the opportunities of the present.
In fact, the actual pioneers of impact investing began laying the groundwork for this latest incarnation decades ago. Think of the Ford Foundation’s work in the 1960s to establish, legitimize, and get U.S. government policy support for Program Related Investments, the “Philanthropy at Five [Percent]” movement in nineteenth century America and England, the Russell Sage Foundation’s financing of low-income housing in New York in the early 1900s, or, in more recent times, the Calvert Foundation, just to name a few.
Or simply consider the modern microfinance industry and how an ecosystem of financing mechanisms – including dozens of “microfinance investment vehicles” (MIVs) – grew up around it in the 1990s and 2000s. Even today, according to an important study by the Global Impact Investing Network (GIIN) and JPMorgan Social Finance, close to 40 percent of impact investments are in microfinance institutions (MFIs) or funds. Microfinance is the largest single sector for receiving impact investments, and is larger than its two closest competitors combined. Clearly there are strong linkages between microfinance and impact investing, and additional opportunities for sharing lessons.
> Posted by Alex Counts, President and CEO, Grameen Foundation
The following post was originally published on the Grameen Foundation Insights Blog. It’s the first part of Counts’ two-part post on scarcity and its implications for microfinance and poverty alleviation. Part two can be found here.
The field of behavioral economics – the intersection of psychology and economics – is fairly new. This is a partial explanation of why its lessons have not yet been applied much to microfinance and anti-poverty programs generally. But this is clearly changing, and none-too-soon, as microfinance in particular is in need of reinvention and rebranding.
In fact, I am coming to believe that thoughtful applications of behavioral economics can be a central part of defining and realizing the idea of “responsible microfinance” that the Microfinance CEO Working Group and others are championing and also “full financial inclusion” that moves the dial on poverty.
An excellent new book titled Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, by Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir (Times Books, 2013), will make this process of leveraging the insights of behavioral economics into microfinance much easier. Drawing on decades of research, it focuses on an analysis of the phenomenon of scarcity – having too little of anything important to the human experience – and the implications of that analysis for policy and practice.
A note of caution. Lest behavioral economics becomes a new fad in international development and microfinance, or worse yet that I receive part of the blame for that, let me say something clearly. I see behavioral economics as an important lens, which is to say a powerful vantage point to look at efforts to reduce poverty and improve the human condition. Gender is another powerful lens. Race, political economy, biology, mental health, and asset building are also potentially useful lenses.
Now, let me explore a bit what the world looks like when viewed through this lens.
Understanding Poverty through the Psychology and Economics of Scarcity
The study of scarcity through the discipline of behavioral economics tells us something profoundly important. When the human mind perceives scarcity of anything important – money, time, or human contact, to cite three examples – it starts behaving in fundamentally different ways. It focuses on managing and alleviating the short-term scarcity, and in general it does that very effectively. The authors call this the “focus dividend.” Research cited in the book shows, for example, that many dimensions of performance are improved in a situation of scarcity.
> Posted by Alex Counts, President and CEO, Grameen Foundation
The Financial Inclusion 2020 Global Forum was a remarkable and historic convening. I was honored to have been invited to attend and co-facilitate an “ideas to action” roundtable about one of the five parts of the Roadmap to Financial Inclusion .
Immediately after the event I reached out to Elisabeth Rhyne to understand how I could help build on the groundwork laid at the conference. She suggested I write a blog post about my experience. My immediate reaction was that commenting on such a wide-ranging and successful effort was a bit daunting. But I felt it was worth a try.
Dissecting the Term “Financial Inclusion”
I will admit that I have warmed slowly to the language of financial inclusion and financial capability. Are these just new buzzwords for time-tested concepts? (And if so, why use them?) Let’s assume they are new concepts. If so, financial inclusion feels like more of a means than an end. For me, the end is the reduction of poverty and the empowerment of low-income women – so why not focus on those? If having a poor or even middle-class person simply open their first “no frills” bank account is considered a step towards financial inclusion, regardless of how useful or helpful that bank account is, is this banner a lackluster one to rally under? Further, it is not clear to me that the provision of quality financial services through informal financial institutions (however defined) is being properly valued in the financial inclusion agenda. Finally, does making “financial capability” something of a prerequisite for people accessing formal financial services effectively let financial institutions off the hook for meeting clients where they are and designing appropriate products for them?
While my apprehension about these concepts has not entirely dissipated, I emerged from the Global Forum feeling that this campaign for full financial inclusion, at least as defined by CFI, is evolving as a powerful rallying point for a diverse coalition of providers, regulators, technologists, researchers, and activists. The notion of full inclusion is essential. I now see financial capability as a concept that defines the end state when financial education (through whatever means) is done effectively. The Forum probably had a similar impact on many others – helping them travel from a place of confusion or even wariness towards strong alignment and shared purpose.
> Posted by Mary Jo Kochendorfer, Manager, Social Performance Management Center, Grameen Foundation
Mary Jo Kochendorfer, on right, at AFMIN Annual Conference in Uganda.
This post by Mary Jo Kochendorfer was originally published on the Progress out of Poverty blog. Progress out of Poverty is an initiative of the Grameen Foundation that assists microfinance institutions and other organizations measure and track the poverty levels of groups and individuals, and in turn better manage their programs.
This past summer, the microfinance industry recently celebrated a milestone when the Social Performance Task Force (SPTF) released the Universal Standards of Social Performance Management (USSPM) after a worldwide consensus-building effort. After much work and collaboration, the microfinance industry, by way of the SPTF, came together and put forth standards which outline the best practices for monitoring and managing social performance. The SPTF defines social performance as “the effective translation of an institution’s social mission into practice in line with accepted social values.” Following the SPTF annual meeting back in June, regional microfinance networks have also prioritized social performance in their agendas.
Last month, the Africa Microfinance Network (AFMIN) hosted its annual conference in Kampala, Uganda to discuss “the State-of-the-Practice of Social Performance Management in Africa.” While there, I participated in a panel on Poverty Measurement Tools along with colleagues from Caurie-Microfinance, VisionFund International and CGAP.
> Posted by Alex Counts, President & CEO, Grameen Foundation
An Important Book with Implications for Poverty Alleviation Globally
This post by Alex Counts was originally published on his blog, where he describes the process of writing a book on Haitian microfinance pioneer Fonkoze.
It has been a few weeks since I have posted on this blog, but I have continued to study and to work inside Fonkoze all along. Now I feel like I finally have a juicy topic to write about and time to do so.
In response to my post on outcomes and impact (as opposed to inputs) in poverty reduction programs, Meredith Kimbell, a top-notch management consultant in the Washington, DC area whom I have known for years, mentioned the book Better by a physician named Atul Gawande, and in particular a chapter towards the end titled “The Bell Curve.” I read the entire book, which is basically about how the practice of medicine has been and can be improved (with lessons for other disciplines). I found that the book had some important lessons for the effort to end poverty through holistic approaches to microfinance such as those employed by Fonkoze.
The first third of the book is made up of some powerful examples of how medicine has improved, from the mundane (ensuring hospital staff wash their hands more frequently) to the dramatic (the story behind the massive improvements in battlefield medicine through trial and error-based innovation and rigorous quality control). The main lesson I took away from this section was that significant improvement in performance can be realized simply by more rigorously applying known best practices. Certainly this has applications to microfinance and poverty-fighting generally.
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