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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 Anne Hastings on Innovations from the Field
…I was feeling a bit overwhelmed when I received the invitation to comment on John's paper. I was struggling hard with problems like 'how are we going to reach scale while keeping the focus on the poorest, when the economy is deteriorating so rapidly?' How am I going to control my sometimes overzealous staff in their enthusiasm for introducing new, more flexible savings and loan products when we don't even have control over our existing products? In our mission to accompany our poor out of poverty do we have the right mix of complementary services or are there others that we need to offer if we are to be successful. I'm sure that the other practitioners in this room have struggled with similar problems as you lead your MFIs over the difficult road we have to travel. Perhaps like me, you too find it difficult to allocate your time to surfing the net, looking for solutions to your challenges. Perhaps like me, you don't have the time or the resources to travel from microfinance conference to microfinance conference to learn all you obviously need to know.
The beauty of John's paper is that in the space of about an hour and a half, he took me from India to Bangladesh to Nepal and China to look at how others are reaching scale. Then I visited Benin, India and Niger to see how others are learning to reach the poorest. With John's help, I made a stop at CGAP to learn about their poverty assessment tool and then another stop at FINCA to look at their tool for targeting the most vulnerable. On each of these visits I didn't have time to go into details about each innovation but I did get a good idea of what the innovation was and how I could learn more about it through a visit to a specific website or by writing an email to the innovator, him or herself. As my staff and I were laboring over the design of our first individual credit product for graduates of our solidarity groups, John accompanied me on trips to Peru, Bolivia, Bangladesh and Russia to look at some especially creative products that put savings first or that provide new flexibility in loan terms and even one that goes beyond the group guarantee. My leadership team is now assessing the set of complimentary services we offer to see if it is really designed to empower even the poorest and most illiterate of our clients. We are especially looking at the pros and cons of adding products like offering life insurance. Thanks to John, I was able to make a visit to Uganda, the Philippines, Honduras and South Africa to see how MFIs in these countries are approaching the problem of complimentary services. In short, John's paper helped me to separate the challenges Fonkoze faces, to identify resources that can guide us and to ease the sense of aloneness all of us practitioners feel from time to time. Continue to Questions and Answers for Plenary Panelists |