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| Volume 1, Issue 4: September '03 | ||||
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In This Issue Plenary Session: Empowering Women Through Microfinance/ Innovations from the Field Plenary Session: Presentation of BRAC Institutional Action Plan State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report 2003 to be released November 3 in New York USAID and SEEP Network to Facilitate Development of Poverty Assessment Tools Archived Issues
Vol 1 Iss 4 Sept. '03 |
Plenary Session: Empowering Women Through Microfinance/Innovations from the FieldRemarks by John Hatch on Innovations from the Field
…innovation is a fact of life in our movement and I would almost say microfinance itself, if it's anything, it's a process of constant innovation. And the worst thing we can do is to try and compartmentalize our learning and our innovations and slap an intellectual property sticker on these innovations. We have to share them. And as the father of village banking, I want to use myself as a first example. I think the first, the finest, or at least the most important thing I ever did was to not only create this methodology that came to be called village banking, but to give it away. And because I gave it away there are now at least 300 programs of village banking worldwide. And so the contribution comes from giving away our learning to others. Because the process of innovation itself is, you imitate, you assimilate and you innovate.
…Finally, I want to talk about organizing and sharing useful information on innovation. I think what we really need desperately in our movement, and I'm going to recommend it here. And that is, I think we need a center for innovation reporting. I think we need a website accessible to all of us, all over the world. Where we are accumulating information on innovation and somebody is editing it, getting it into a database and organizing it by categories. We can organize it for example by institutional function; innovations in administration, in governance, in program, in evaluation. We can organize that database by key issues: scale up issues, self-sufficiency issues, gender issues. Also we can organize that data by who is attempting to replicate it. It would be so neat to have a database where not only do we have all the innovations, let's say for scale up, but after each innovation, we have a list of the other organizations that are also trying to take this innovation and run with it and that way we can create almost like mini list serves among those interested in particular innovations. But none of us, at the practitioner levels, I'm referring to, have the time to really do this job. We've got a job of putting the services out there, evaluating those services, fundraising for those services and we just don't have the time to do a good job of innovation reporting. It's got to be somebody else's full time job. I think it needs to be institutionalized. I think if we could create something like a news bureau where there were let's say a reporter on innovation, per continent, who was going around, just gathering innovations and not only gathering innovations, but reporting on outcomes of innovations, somebody just dedicated to that reporting function. If we had that, one on every continent, and if at the center we could have somebody compiling that and putting it into a data base and then charging the movement a user fee to get into that data base, a modest user fee [that would be helpful]. We can pay for the whole thing by ourselves as a movement and at the same time we can have a fantastic goldmine of innovation being reported on time, being checked for us on time, being organized for us in a very timely fashion. |