Questions and Answers for Plenary Panelists

Question, Thomas Fisher, from the New Economics Foundation in London: The key question that I wanted to put to you was how do you manage the tensions that often arise between reaching financial targets and sustainability and between achieving developmental objectives?

Dr. Sonya Sultan: It's very important to remember why we are in this business . . . if I can call it "business". And, it is very much for overall empowerment of the poor to eradicate poverty. So, for example, we have made a very conscious decision about the target group that we want to reach. Although you know, we have a huge program that's reaching 3.5 million clients, we could scale this up even more if we weren't concerned so much about which section of the poor or poorest we were reaching. At the moment, it takes one of our microfinance branches three to four years to become financially sustainable. If we gave out bigger loans to slightly better off people, we could achieve this within a year. But, that's not what we're there for . . . not to show to the big targets and to come and tell you we're financially sustainable. We'd like to tell you who we're reaching and the impact we're having.

But, the issue of financial sustainability for us is also important to meet our development goals… so what we've tried to do is have this balance where we have these commercial ventures which are also linked to our development activities but are just really professionally run business ventures.

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