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> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI
#478613226 / gettyimages.com
I recently attended the annual meeting of the Microfinance Network (MFN), which was hosted by the Alexandria Business Association in Alexandria, Egypt. MFN is a global network of some of the largest and leading microfinance institutions, and its annual meeting has long been known for candid and in-depth sharing of experience among the leaders of these institutions, as this post demonstrates.
Ask a microfinance CEO what’s making his or her life hard these days, and the answer is likely to be politics.
That’s hardly surprising when the speaker is Motaz Tabaa, CEO of the Alexandria Business Association (ABA), one of the largest microfinance institutions (MFIs) in Egypt. On January 28, 2011, when the occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo held the world’s attention and led to the resignation of then-President Mubarak, it became impossible for ABA to operate. But before the week was over, staff were back on the streets, collecting and disbursing loans, and sleeping at the office to guard the cash that couldn’t be deposited in banks, which remained still closed.
Nearly every MFI in the group had a similar encounter with crisis – consider the political violence (and/or natural disaster) that has touched Uganda, Nigeria, Armenia, Mexico, Haiti, and Bangladesh in recent years. Today, Al Majmoua in Lebanon and Tamweelcom in Jordan are overwhelmed with the attempt to serve the Syrian refugees that have crossed their borders. The CEOs who have experienced such upheaval agreed about the role of MFIs in responding quickly to help clients obtain cash, keep their businesses open, and then rebuild. Given how prevalent political and natural crises are, organizations have developed protocols for responding quickly. Even while we met, Enrique Majos of Compartamos received news of a tornado in Mexico, and sent the Compartamos natural disaster team into action.
> Posted by Barbara Magnoni, President, EA Consultants and Client Value Project Manager, MicroInsurance Centre MicroInsurance Learning and Knowledge (MILK) Project
The Financial Inclusion 2020 campaign at the Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion is building a movement toward full financial inclusion by 2020. This blog series spotlights financial inclusion efforts around the globe, shares insights from the FI2020 consultative process, and highlights findings from “Mapping the Invisible Market.”
Is there a business case for microinsurance? Does it provide value for clients?
We began the MILK Project by mapping existing research on these two questions. We were surprised to see that very few studies were on life microinsurance, particularly because life products are the most commonly sold type of microinsurance. A well-known study also suggests that the poor are very concerned about the financial risks of death, nearly as much as they are about health events.
Given that life microinsurance is both common and potentially greatly needed, why was there so little research on this topic? Life insurance is difficult to study because in any group, only a few deaths will occur in a given span of time, making it a very infrequent and random event. The policy world has also, perhaps, been skeptical about its value. Life microinsurance lacks the glamour of the promise of microcredit and the clear social good of savings. While health and agricultural microinsurance products are often developed with donor support as part of larger investments in health services, infrastructure, or agricultural inputs, life microinsurance is more often commercially driven.
We too began our research on the value for clients of life microinsurance with healthy skepticism, asking whether there really is financial value for clients from these products and if so, whether clients perceive them as valuable. Two years into our project, our results are promising, and even to ourselves, surprising. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Ignacio Mas, Independent Consultant
Google Trends is a public web facility which shows how often particular search terms are entered in Google relative to the total search volume, globally or for individual countries, and for defined time periods (after 2004). This gives us a good perspective into how people are approaching our industry. I looked up some of the most prominent financial inclusion terms, and found some very interesting things.
Industry rebranding. The first graph below shows that the search term “microfinance” has been much more popular than “microcredit” over the last eight years. (In each graph, all data points are scaled relative to the highest value on that graph – see methodological note at the end of this post.) “Microcredit” surged in late 2006 with the granting of the Nobel Peace Prize to Muhammad Yunus. Since then, searches on “microcredit” have been decreasing in relative terms and, by contrast, the new term “financial inclusion” has been gaining ground and is now comparable in its use as a search term to “microcredit.” Still, despite strong attempts from many quarters to rebrand around the financial inclusion label, it has not yet taken off.
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