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So many people wished to salute Monique Cohen that we wanted to give them more room, and so here are two more colleagues expressing their appreciation for her work.
Heather Clark is an independent consultant who, among her appointments, previously managed CFI’s now-completed Beyond Codes project. Robyn Robertson is currently Director of Financial Education at Opportunity International. Of course, more comments are always welcome.
Recently someone asked me “who do you consider a hero?”
I thought about this for a long time. For me a hero has to have vision, determination, and the wherewithal to make the vision something important, valuable to society, and lasting. It’s much better if the vision battles the current wisdom, as there is nothing like challenging the way the world works.
Implementing Monique’s vision was not easy in the early days. No one wanted to hear about clients, when the focus was on organizational sustainability. Monique battled the early days of impact assessment and continued, amazingly undaunted. She found the vision — “it’s about understanding clients,” she said.
Perhaps it sounds so simple now. But without Monique, without Microfinance Opportunities, we would never have had such a clear path for the future.
> Posted by Ignacio Mas, Independent Consultant
“I feared and distrusted them: feared them because they could reject me and expose me to mortification of defeat, and mistrusted them because I did not understand them.”
In his reminiscences of youth, Alan Moorehead said this of women, but it could equally apply to many people’s attitude to banks. People’s concerns about banks are phrased in surprisingly similar terms wherever you go in the developing world. (See this clip for a typical example.)
This got me thinking: how much of people’s fear and mistrust of banks is due to a lack of understanding? Let’s explore three typical articulations of the distance between banks and ordinary people.
“Banks are for rich people; what do they want from me?”
The understanding gap here is in the motivations and intentions of banks when they approach the base of the pyramid. It’s a very human reaction: if someone who has never shown any interest in me suddenly starts cozying up, I get on guard. Banks venturing down-market need to explain where they see the opportunity, otherwise people will not believe there is a commitment or, worse, will interpret ulterior motives. This requires articulating a joint vision of success for the bank and the new client segments, and consistently demonstrating behaviors that gives credence to the claim. Equity Bank in Kenya has been particularly effective in conveying the idea that its success is intertwined with the success of ordinary Kenyans; its positioning is credible.
Starting a family is an exciting time. Though amidst the new joys, it’s important to decide how your family will function. In the following post, Top 10 Online Universities blog, a wide-spanning resource for navigating young adulthood, offers financial advice for young families embarking on the terrain of joint credit card accounts.
This is an example of financial education messaging for young adults in the United States. In what ways do you think it is relevant (or not) for people at the bottom of the pyramid in developing countries?
The post begins:
Sharing a credit card with your partner is a very big deal. What was once all yours to spend is now also theirs. But unlike co-signing a lease or sharing a cell phone family plan, credit card debt is undefined. Before you and your significant other apply for a joint credit card, please check out the following tips for managing a shared credit card.
> Posted by Chris Dunford, Senior Research Fellow, Freedom from Hunger
Chris Dunford of Freedom from Hunger responds to a question we posed at the end of the recent post regarding Avanza: How does such new technology affect the client/loan officer relationship that is so central to the operations of many MFIs? The post begins:
Although less celebrated than solidarity group and loan contract innovations, another unique feature of microfinance is the regular face time between clients and agents of organizations from outside the isolated world of a poor person. Agents variously known as loan officers, credit officers, field agents, promoters, or animators can accompany and guide poor clients on their journeys toward mainstream society and economy and can be social intermediaries between the poor and whatever services and opportunities are available in the larger world outside their communities. The importance of such facilitation increases in proportion to the isolation of the poor, which is especially severe for women and those in very poor, rural communities.
>Posted by Center Staff
Microfinance Transparency recently released an interactive video designed to share information about flat and declining interest rates in an engaging new way. It tells the story of “Chantal” and “Auntie-Need-a-Loan.” Auntie doesn’t read the terms and conditions of her loan. Unfortunately, her carelessness leads her to get tricked by loan predators, pay high fees, miscalculate her interest, and miss her loan payments. The concept was created to help industry stakeholders to convey important pricing transparency and consumer protection messages.
In addition to this animation, “Auntie-Need-a-Loan” will be featured in radio public service announcements, training materials and other print materials throughout Rwanda and Malawi.
Check out the full animation here!
Image credit: 17triggers.com
Have you read?
A Call for Caution in Judging the Merits of Financial Education: A Review of ‘Bridging the Gap‘
Structure for Success: Lessons from a Kenyan Financial Literacy Teacher
> Posted by Susy Cheston
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at Accion.
Are we “rushing inclusion perhaps to its early death,” as a recent post from the Kenya Financial Education Centre asks? In the post, John Gitau’s concern is that in our rush to access, we are getting ahead of clients’ capacity to use services wisely and well. It’s a good concern to raise, and it is especially legitimate when posed by someone who sees the fall-out up close and personal.
And yet the Center for Financial Inclusion is spearheading a Financial Inclusion 2020 project that is breathtaking in its audacity: building a movement to full financial inclusion for all, using the year 2020 as a focal point to clarify thinking and galvanize action. The argument of the Center is that working backwards from 2020—near enough that we can track our progress, far enough away that change is possible—results in a different kind of thinking than incremental strategies to add a few million clients here and there. To this end we are working with a wide range of partners to build a road map to full inclusion, pushing to accelerate what we believe to be critical access to financial services for those who are excluded. We are casting our net wide—engaging any and all who want to be involved in this effort.*
So, we are building a road map to inclusion–or, as our friend from Kenya might ask, are we building a road to ruin? Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Julie Shea
Large scale commercialization of microfinance institutions (MFIs) has led to an increased focus on profitability and with that a growing fear of “mission drift.” In an industry facing increased demands for both social and financial performance, how can investors in microfinance funds ensure that both of these “bottom lines” are appropriately balanced? One way is to create incentive structures that measure and compensate fund managers and the managers of the microfinance institutions (MFIs) in which they invest in accordance with the stated mission of the fund.
Paul DiLeo of Grassroots Capital Management, in his recently published paper, Re-Positioning Microfinance with Impact Investors: Codes of Conduct and “Social First” MFIs, argues that investors should do a better job of articulating their fund’s priorities. Rather than promoting a single, standard model, DiLeo promotes a framework, developed by the Monitor Institute, that more clearly positions funds along a spectrum from “Social First” to “Financial First”. In adopting this framework, investors are encouraged to provide transparency and to attract likeminded investors that support the mission of the MFI. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Monique Cohen, Founder and President of Microfinance Opportunities
This post is part of the Center for Financial Inclusion’s Expert Exchange: Building A Movement Toward Financial Inclusion by 2020, cultivating conversation around the goal of reaching full financial inclusion by 2020. For further questions about this series, write to , Fellow, Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International.
If financial services are a means to an end, then financial education is a means to a means.
Let me explain. Generally speaking, we see a link between financial services and clients meeting their financial goals. Taking one step back, however, we see that financial education facilitates the success of financial services.
Clients don’t always know what is possible, which limits their ability to make good choices. Financial education is a way of showing clients what is possible. With this knowledge, they will be better able to choose and use financial services.
Let’s take cell phone banking. Because cell phone banking makes services accessible to people in remote locations, many of the people who want to take up cell phone banking have never had a bank account. They may not understand the concept behind banking. Unless we engage in financial education, we are asking them, unfairly, to leap-frog both into a new technology and a financial system that may be unfamiliar, intimidating, and confusing.
Financial education does have a role in helping us to increase the use of our products, yes. But, as Larry Reed mentioned in this forum, it also plays a role in educating us, the providers. I argue that the exercise of financial education forces recognition of the gaps in our customers’ comprehension of how financial products can help them achieve their goals. Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Adriana Magdas
Why is educational inclusion for children with disabilities so essential to financial inclusion?
The answer to that question came to me one day while I was browsing the BBC News. A headline caught my attention: “Disabled Children Excluded from Education.” That article and a bit more research revealed statistics on the extent of the exclusion from education faced by children with disabilities. Among the facts I learned:
- according to UNICEF’s “State of the World’s Children Report,” approximately 150 million children around the world have a disability; and,
- the UNESCO “Education for All Global Monitoring Report” claims that more than one-third of out-of-school children have a disability, and in Africa, fewer than 10 percent of disabled children are in school.
The statistics I gathered show that children with disabilities are disproportionately excluded from education, a human right that enables them to be more competitive and access a wider range of future income-generating opportunities. Since over 80 percent of the 785 million people with disabilities worldwide live in developing countries (Enable/United Nations), it’s obvious that most of these children with disabilities will face many hardships and obstacles to earning a decent income when they mature.
So to return to the question, why, indeed, is educational inclusion for children with disabilities key to financial inclusion? Read the rest of this entry »
> Posted by Leah Wardle
A kid named Boyie is a popular radio disk jockey in Kenya. At 19 years old, he has a nationally syndicated radio show playing daily on 21 stations and half of Kenya’s mostly low-income youth say they’ve listened to him. He’s so popular that he also stars in his own monthly comic book series, Shujaaz (“Heroes”), read by about 10 million people in the past 20 months. The ladies love him and the guys copy his dreadlocks. But someone else answers his calls, texts, and Facebook messages (which flood in by the thousands), because Boyie is a cartoon character.
A cartoon character can be more powerful than a real person when it comes to influencing the thoughts and behavior of Kenyan youth, argues Rob Burnet, director of Well Told Story, the Kenyan communications company behind Boyie and Shujaaz. He and his team are using virtual characters to reach Kenyan teenagers through comic books, radio shows, and virtual media with messages of social change. Their methods may hold creative new ideas for microfinance practitioners looking to connect with clients.
It’s something else to witness the compelling struggle of a teenage head-of-household, living in a slum, facing multiple challenges and pleading siblings, yet still setting aside a little bit each week. Now tell the story with colorful images and dramatic plots that resonate with the experience of the audience, and deliver through easily available media, and they readily absorb the messages as they follow the lives of the quirky characters.
Microfinance practitioners might take a page from Shujaaz to increase the transparency of financial information for clients. Transparency means providing full information (like detailed product terms and prices) in a way that is meaningful to the client. That means clients can absorb the information because it’s presented in their own language, and they feel comfortable with the medium. To reach this goal, Well Told Story’s model would suggest practitioners ask themselves three important questions: Read the rest of this entry »
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