Mary Dakim

Portfolios of the Excluded: Anyone who has lived or worked in the field recognizes the difference in international development research that is enriched by voices and realities of the field versus what is produced in developed countries based on books, internet searches, and a general literature review. For that reason, I was delighted to hear of The Center for Financial Inclusion’s goal of finding case studies from across the world of non-subsidized financial services for persons with disabilities (PWDs). I think their approach will yield a more authentic perspective on the magnitude of exclusion for this population. Whether the investigation yields root causes on the demand or supply side, it will allow for a deeper understanding of the opportunities and obstacles persons with disabilities as well as financial service providers face in reaching inclusion for this population. If you have case studies, please let us know via a comment below or email us.

In hopes of providing one of those “voices from the field,” I offer you my own story. My personal experience living in Nigeria for 28 years as a woman with a disability and facing poverty is unlike the millions of other similar women with disabilities whose stories will remain unwritten and unknown. I was lucky to have been accompanied on my personal path to financial citizenship.

Access to Finance: I was born and raised in poverty. My parents, who are both farmers, did not have access to microfinance. They were income-generating farmers who, like many of their peers, hid their money in a metal box.

My old elementary school in Nigeria.

To access “credit,” my father would borrow money from friends and repay his loan with maize harvest. Personally, while growing up in the village, I would hide my money under my bed. However, I would switch locations from time to time for fear that someone would find it. One time, during elementary school, I decided on a large cardboard box that was attached to a wall of my grandmother’s room. Formerly, the large box was home to my brother’s three birds; now, it was my personal safe deposit box. Despite my sense of security, one day, mice destroyed the money (US$30), which was in the form of paper notes. It had taken me 3 months of selling cooked vegetables after school to save that amount, and I had hoped to spend it on a school lunch allowance that my parents could not afford. I could have purchased at least 2 weeks’ worth of lunches. Similar situations were true for most of my friends who were deaf—they hid any cash they had under their pillows or elsewhere in their homes.

First Bank Visit in Nigeria: My first formal banking experience was in 2001 (at about 27 years old) when I began teaching at a public school for the deaf. A leader in the deaf education community in Nigeria accompanied me to a bank, where he had an account. The treatment that I received and the overall experience were both helped enormously by his presence and status as an existing customer. For example, before the agent realized that my friend was an existing customer, the agent was unwilling to communicate with us in writing—we were limited to reading his lips. In fact, the agent initially thought that we were beggars, since some people who are deaf in Nigeria enter offices, banks, and public places with requests for charity. Eventually, this bank closed, and I was unable to salvage my assets, since I was already in the United States.

First Bank Visit in the United States: My first banking visit in the United States could not have been more different. Again, I was lucky to be accompanied, this time by an employee of Gallaudet University, who is assigned to support the on-boarding of international students to their new communities. As soon as we informed the bank employee we were deaf, she reached for paper and pen and even attempted to communicate with the sign language that she knew. I was treated like any other new customer who spoke a different language. I appreciated the effort made by the staff at the Northeast branch (722 H Street) of Bank of America in Washington, DC. I experienced financial inclusion.

Remembering Quality: While the adoption, signing, and ratifying of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has the capacity to increase the integration of PWDs into formal financial services, it is not enough. Even if an MFI aims to work towards financial inclusion, how will quality be ensured and measured as a part of this quest for inclusion? What happens when the person with disability is unaccompanied — whether in Nigeria or the United States?

I was delighted to read Beth Rhyne’s announcement that the Center for Financial Inclusion  seeks to answer this question about quality, among others, as a part of their leadership in financial inclusion. I agree with her perspective that the purpose of microfinance “is not to cure poverty but to reach out to the most marginalized groups.” Not only does the Center’s Smart Campaign protect clients, but also new programs like the one aimed towards financial inclusion for persons with disabilities will afford opportunities to preserve the quality of products and services that all people deserve as they define the destinies of their own financial citizenship.

Beth Rhyne’s latest contribution to the Huffington Post examines specific steps that microfinance leaders are taking to respond to a legion of new challenges facing the industry.

Vijay Mahajan, founder of the microfinance institution BASIX, and widely regarded as the dean of Indian microfinance, is walking the hot and dusty roads of rural India in his kurta pajama and sandals, and as he’s walking he’s thinking about the microfinance industry’s tough year. A crisis of overindebtedness among some clients in Andhra Pradesh, India, political attacks on Mohammad Yunus of Grameen Bank, and academic studies that question the magnitude of microloan impact have all conspired to shake the global microfinance community at its roots.

Vijay, who has devoted thirty years of his life to microfinance, is taking these challenges very seriously. He has dropped all routine activities and is spending two months walking in villages across India, both as a spiritual journey and as a way to listen fully to the voices of low income people…

To read the rest of this article, click here.

Other Huffington Post articles by Beth Rhyne:

Three Secrets of Safe Microfinance – January 20, 2011

Like sex, microfinance can be safe if practiced responsibly. Recently, however, we’ve seen that not all participants in the microfinance industry are practicing safe microfinance. As happens with that other risky activity, the players in microfinance face temptations that lure them away from healthy long term relationships. One need look…

A Tale of Microfinance in Two Cities – December 13, 2010

Microfinance in India is undergoing a crisis caused by a toxic mix of mushrooming growth and political volatility. As they ponder their next steps, participants in the Indian microfinance sector would do well to examine another crisis that touched microfinance, in Bolivia in the years 1999 and 2000….

On Microfinance: Who’s to Blame for the Crisis in Andhra Pradesh? – November 2, 2010

When a story on microfinance appears in major media outlets, the effect on the public image of the sector can be dramatic. That’s why last Friday’s article in the Wall Street Journal, “India’s Major Crisis in Microlending,” requires a response. The story covers a microfinance crisis in the…

An Open Letter to Elizabeth Warren – October 18, 2010

“The industry is trying to fix itself right now” – Elizabeth Warren, speaking on “In Business with Margaret Brennan”

Dear Ms.Warren,

What an important challenge you face in bringing the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau into being! Although you’re reputed to be a woman not easily daunted, it might…

Funding the Risk Frontier in Microfinance – September 13, 2010

The recent IPO of SKS Microfinance, India’s largest microfinance institution (MFI), was a watershed event whose ripples are affecting the public perception of microfinance. When an organization originally founded as a nonprofit first attracts some $75 million in successive waves of private equity capital and then raises $358…

Measure? Alleviate? No, Eliminate Poverty – August 17, 2010

While academics from prestigious East Coast universities are developing randomized trials to test the impact of microfinance on poverty – and coming up only with modest-sounding results, Martín Burt, the founder of Fundación Paraguaya , is making a bold leap. Not content to measure poverty impact, or even…

Microfinance: Keeping the Mission When Non-Profits Become For-Profits – August 9, 2010

Most people with a lively interest in microfinance know that the majority of microloans dispensed throughout the world today come from for-profit microfinance institutions, rather than donation-dependent non-governmental organizations (NGOs). What may be less recognized is how these for-profit MFIs were born. Many of the world’s largest and most successful…

A New Financial Access Frontier: Persons With Disabilities – July 27, 2010

Can a person with a disability living in a developing country become the valued client of a financial institution? According to Harvard Law professor Michael Stein, 650 million people around the world, nearly 10 percent of humanity, have a disability, and over 80 percent of these people live in developing…

The Impact of Microfinance: Grameen Foundation Provides a Primer – June 21, 2010

What’s the impact of microfinance? A question with 150 million answers, one for every client around the world who receives microfinance services. Academics who wield sophisticated statistical tools to assess complex social phenomena like microfinance give answers with more precision, but they don’t always spend much time explaining their…

Microfinance Among the Populists – June 11, 2010

Populist governments across Latin America are re-shaping the environment in which microfinance institutions (MFIs) provide financial services to low income people. The proposals of these governments are similar -interest rate caps that are politically attractive but unfeasible, public intervention in financial services (as they have nationalized other industries) and a…

Why are Microfinance Interest Rates So High? – May 28, 2010

Americans often suffer sticker shock when they hear about interest rates charged in international microfinance. At annualized rates above 20 percent, most Americans start getting uncomfortable, and when they hear that in some places annual rates rise as high as 100 percent or even more, their moral outrage beepers start…

How Much Debt is Too Much? Microlenders Want to Know. – May 17, 2010

When does a borrower cross the line from leveraged into losing it? Every borrower wants to avoid sliding into debt stress. Lenders, too, have a stake in ensuring that their clients cope successfully with their debt burdens. If no one wants debt stress, why is there so much of…

Lessons for Microfinance – April 20, 2010

Lately the microfinance industry has come under a lot of scrutiny, but media coverage doesn’t reveal the full picture. A recent New York Times article painted microfinance an industry overrun by big banks that charge eye-popping interest rates. First, a couple of misperceptions have to be cleared…

Image credit: Lorenz Kerscher