Tag Archive

> Posted by Elisabeth Rhyne, Managing Director, CFI

The following post was originally published on The WorldPost blog of The Huffington Post.

In a recent retrospective, Rich Rosenberg called Pancho Otero, the founding leader of Bolivia’s Prodem and BancoSol, a genius. With Pancho’s sudden death last month, I find myself surprised to speak with many people who work in microfinance or financial inclusion today but do not know about Pancho’s genius. And so, I would like to take this moment to tell the story of who Pancho was and what he accomplished.

Genius can be applied in many spheres, from art to action. But all notions of genius share the idea that a genius sees beyond the things ordinary people see and works in some extraordinary way to bring that vision into being, disregarding conventional boundaries. I think Pancho would have enjoyed this thought about genius, by seventeenth century English author Jonathan Swift, “When a great genius appears in the world you may know him by this sign; that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” But that is the end of the story, not the beginning.

In 1986 Pancho was hired by Accion to start a microenterprise lending organization in Bolivia. His signal accomplishment was to create an organization that was so good at what it did that it gave rise to the idea – and then the reality – that a microfinance operation lending exclusively to the poor could become a full fledged commercial bank. And when Prodem launched BancoSol, Pancho became President of the first private commercial bank in Latin America dedicated to the microenterprises of the poor. BancoSol, in turn gave impulse to the transformation of microfinance NGOs into financial institutions all over the world and set the ball rolling for the widespread commercialization of microfinance.

Read the rest of this entry »