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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 FieldQuestions and Answers for Plenary Panelists about Innovations from the FieldQuestion #1, read by Plenary Chair Len Good: Thank you John for your paper, continuing to innovate as you have been doing for us for two decades. I was interested in your concept of the central repository of information on innovation. I wanted to ask you, since many of us are members of microfinance networks that have global reach and many of us focus on best practice documentation and dissemination within our own networks, how would you see that combining with the effort that you're talking about? John Hatch: If you want to do it, do it. It's only going to help the overall availability of knowledge and information. But I believe that it would be useful to have also, for general benefit of the thousands of MFIs that don't belong to a particular network to have access to this kind of a resource. So, my candidate is [the Microcredit Summit Campaign]. I think they would be a fine place to base the center and get a few interns going, a few reporters going, they've shown they can go all over the world doing this very effectively. I didn't consult that with Sam prior, so this comes as a big surprise to him. But yes, I think this would be a good place to put everybody, and any individual network that wants to do it its own way, please do it. Question #2: For Ann, Fonkoze apparently has a remittance service, could you talk a little about the remittance service of your MFI.
Anne Hastings: Fonkoze for about the last three years has been providing a money transfer service. We actually started this service as a way to help parishes, religious communities and NGOs in the United States who were trying to get their money to Haiti in as expeditious a manner as possible. And it's interesting that parishes don't go to Western Union and … the other places that Haitians go to. And why don't they? They don't because they think it's outrageously expensive and they're sophisticated consumers of financial services and so they just don't pay that kind of money…So we started doing it for them. The way we did it was that we set up a partnership with our bank in New Jersey, City National Bank of New Jersey, which is one of the largest African American banks in the United States and is run by a Haitian born American. And we found it very easy to do. When we decided we should be expanding it to Haitians, we decided to put in a 1-800 number in the United States, have a woman working out of her home and simply answering the 800 number and using e-mail. And the way it works is people just wire transfer or send a check or money order into our account at City National. At the same time they call the 800 number or send an e-mail and the minute it arrives in New Jersey, it is immediately available anywhere in Haiti, because we simply get an e-mail communication that the deposit has been made. The person in Haiti has to have an account, but there's no charge for opening an account and they start to learn about how to have a bank account. So were trying to make better consumers of financial services both among the Haitians living in Haiti but also among the Haitians living abroad. Because truly the unbanked in this country are being ripped off in the amount they pay for financial services. By the way ours is $10 flat no matter how much money you send. Return to Plenary Session: |