Published by Drew Meyers on 30 Sep 2008
Published by Drew Meyers on 25 Sep 2008
YouTube announced their “In My Name” campaign today. Anyone can upload a video between now and November 1st, and then YouTube will make a mashup of the best videos to be played at the UN General Assembly. It’s fantastic to see how new media is changing media by giving anyone and everyone a voice that can be heard by world leaders. You can check out the In My Name YouTube channel here.
[via TechCrunch via Dave Schappell]
Published by Jerry Ostradicky on 25 Sep 2008
9/25/08 — World Millennieum Development Goals Blogging Day
Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation are asking you to join with bloggers around the world to post about making poverty history on September 25th 2008, the World Millennium Development Goals blogging day. More than 300 bloggers are raising their voices to let people know about the 1.2 billion people who live on less than $1 a day. Whether you want to write about the MDGs, a field story from an MFI, a poem, a podcast, a video clip, a jpg of a piece of art, a prayer, an open letter to your leaders, everybody is encouraged to blog about helping end poverty in our world.
For those of you who don’t know what the Millennium Development Goals are, here is a quick summary — at the Millennium Summit in September 2000 the largest gathering of world leaders in history adopted the UN Millennium Declaration, committing their nations to a new global partnership to reduce extreme poverty and setting out a series of time-bound targets, with a deadline of 2015, that have become known as the Millennium Development Goals.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are the world’s time-bound and quantified targets for addressing extreme poverty in its many dimensions-income poverty, hunger, disease, lack of adequate shelter, and exclusion-while promoting gender equality, education, and environmental sustainability. They are also basic human rights-the rights of each person on the planet to health, education, shelter, and security.
Published by Drew Meyers on 24 Sep 2008
I think (hope) you’ll agree with me that this new Schwab Charitable initiative is an exciting development in the microfinance world.
Schwab Charitable, one of the country’s largest and fastest growing nonprofits and facilitators of charitable giving with over $2 billion in assets and $350MM in annual grants, announced today the launch of an innovative microfinance guarantee program. It is the first program of its kind to enable donors to set aside a portion of their Charitable Gift Accounts to guarantee microfinance loans to the world’s poorest entrepreneurs to start, maintain or expand small businesses. Guarantees are different from direct gifts to microfinance in that funds may never have to leave a donor’s account. The new program is designed to allow donors to maximize their charitable impact by putting donated dollars to use as a microfinance guarantee while they are still held in their Charitable Gift Accounts and invested for growth and future granting.
[Hat tip to Dave Schappell at TeachStreet for the e-mail he sent me this morning]
Published by Jerry Ostradicky on 24 Sep 2008
Offering the ideal of “private property for all,” Prisma is a microlender registered as a U.S.-based international holding company offering financial services in Latin America. Its principal business operations are making loans to “unbanked” customers that are ignored by the mainstream finance sector. Prisma makes loans, at risk-adjusted market rates, from USD 50 to USD 15,000. Application for services is open to anyone. 
In Nicaragua in 1995, the two entrepreneurs founded the predecessor to Prisma with $1,000 in personal start-up capital and a $4,000 loan from an American businessman, George Kraus, who is now a Board Member. Prisma has always operated as a business, never accepting donations or subsidies.
Prisma’s vision is that 1% of the stock and bond portfolios held by the investing public will be invested in microfinance as a certified asset class in order to eradicate poverty by creating wealth.
Prisma has operations in the US, Honduras and Nicaragua and offers great internship opportunities for people looking to get a start in microfinance. Interns’ benefits include hands-on microfinance industry experience, direct interaction with Prisma’s CEO and senior management and the opportunity to make a visible contribution to a vibrant, growing company that is making a difference.
Products:
Prisma offers a variety of products designed to meet the needs of its clients:
-Micro, Small and Medium sized Business Loans
-Home & Home Improvement Loans
-Consumer & Auto Financing Loans
Most loans are issued in partnership with other institutions such as employers and civic associations.
Published by Ryan Calkins on 24 Sep 2008
In the US right now we are having a heated debate over who bears the burden of responsibility for the reckless loans that are now crippling our credit system. Is it the borrowers who should not have taken out loans larger than they could afford to repay? Or, is it the lenders who failed to properly vet borrowers?
Concern about overlending and other borrowing pitfalls is obviously on the mind of those attending the Clinton Global Initiative. In response a broad consortium of microfinance organizations have signed onto the Campaign for Client Protection in Microfinance. Accion, one of the signatories, describes the campaign:
Designed to maintain and extend the microfinance industry’s dedication to the welfare of its clients in a period of rapid growth, the campaign will promote a Microbanker’s Oath, akin to the Hippocratic Oath, articulating six core principles:
- Avoidance of reckless lending that creates over-indebtedness
- Transparent and fair pricing
- Collections practices that are not abusive or coercive
- Ethical standards for staff
- Recourse mechanisms for client problems
- Privacy of client data
For more information, check out: www.centerforfinancialinclusion.org
Published by Michelle Grocke on 22 Sep 2008
Micro Finance turned commercial banking on its head. Loans predominantly given to women?…to the poor?…with no collateral? What for decades seemed impossible has even the initial nay-saying pessimists jumping on board.
But what do you get when you turn Micro Finance on its head? You get Jamii Bora.
Established in 1999 by Ingrid Monroe at the initiative of 50 beggars in Nairobi, Jamii Bora has now become the largest Micro Finance Institution in Kenya. Of the belief that, “any family, however poor, miserable, and hopeless, is capable of getting themselves out of poverty”, Jamii Bora extends loans to not only the poor – but to the poorest of the poor. Loans are extended to anyone who is willing to learn how to help themselves: thieves, criminals and prostitutes alike.
At Jamii Bora, there are no ’clients’ or ‘customers’ – just members. Jamii Bora offers its members various types of loans for micro-businesses, school fees and housing, and has additionally implemented its own Health Care and Life Insurance System. For a mere 15 US$/year, a family of five persons can receive a year of health insurance (and this insurance does not just cover the basics…heart surgeries and hip-replacements have all been performed!)
It is a fact that the poor pay more in rent per square meter than the rich. Jamii Bora quickly reached the conclusion that if the poor could construct their own houses, than they could pay the same amount of money per month in loan repayment and soon own the house they live in. This would not only lead to increased savings in their household budget, but would open the doors to investment opportunities for both their businesses and the school of their children. To aid in this process, Jamii Bora purchased a large plot of land on which their members could build their houses. In a sense, they created a town. Now home to approximately 14,000 members, Jamii Boras’ town has a commercial center, a sewage treatment plant and allows for the reality of business growth.
I had the opportunity of listening to Ingrid Monroe speak at this months RESULTS conference call. To say she is inspiring would be a mere understatement – she is revolutionary. Now in the process of building its second town, we can only expect Jamii Bora to grow even larger and continue to eradicate poverty one dream at a time.
I could go on and on about the successes and innovative strategies of Jamii Bora – but there is simply not enough room on this page (and I’m sure I’d lose all my readers)…but check out JamiiBora.org for more information, updated statistics and Ingrid Monroe’s future plans.
Published by Drew Meyers on 22 Sep 2008
As you know, I’m a huge fan of the innovation occurring in the microfinance space. One of places where innovation is ocurring is at MicroPlace.com, eBay’s online marketplace for microfinance investments. The site is celebrating its one year anniversary this October and also recently passed the $1M mark. I got the opportunity to ask Ashwini Narayanan, Director of Product Management, a few questions via e-mail that I wanted to share with a broader group.
Question: You recently hit the one year and $1M mark – what does this mean for MicroPlace?
Answer: We’re quite thrilled with the success MicroPlace has had in its first year of business. When MicroPlace launched, we received 100M impressions. For a little site with a small team, that just blew us away. But what was really magical was when people trusted MicroPlace enough to start opening up their wallets and investing on MicroPlace.So far, we estimate that we have enabled 26,000 loans to poor entrepreneurs who have been starved of capital. We prefer to focus on the number of people impacted than the dollar amount invested as one dollar means a very different thing in Chittagong than in Cleveland. MicroPlace has a global presence with microfinance investment possibilities in 29 countries, even the United States. And while the loan sizes and dollar amounts differ in every country, the life-changing impact that a microfinance loan can have to a poor entrepreneur remains the same. 26,000 lives. That’s an amazing impact. We’re extremely proud.
Question: What’s next for MicroPlace? Do you see room to grow?
Answer: We see tremendous potential. Deutsche Bank recently did a really great study about microfinance (and if you are a complete microfinance geek, you can find it here). They estimated that we need $250B to help all the billion people out there who could use a microfinance loan. So far, the industry has raised $25B.So then the question becomes where to find this money. There are basically three options. The first is to go to government development agencies such as USAID who have historically invested in microfinance for the poverty alleviation impacts. In 2005, the US government spent about $15B on ODA (Overseas Development Assistance), excluding Iraq and Afghanistan. This is a lot of money, but still doesn’t get us to our $250B target.The second option is for a microfinance firm to go the charity route and find a donation. In 2007, Americans gave $300B to charity. That’s a lot of money too, but unless microfinance hogs it all and leave the dolphins and trees with nothing, we still can’t get to our $250B target.The last route is to go the socially responsible investment route. In 2007, Americans invested $2.7T in socially responsible investments, or investments that made a difference in the world. Finally, a lever large enough to be able to address the problem! So this is our market opportunity that we have our eyes on.
Question: What keeps you motivated?
Answer: Recently, our development team programmed a little cash register “cha-ching” sound on one of our main servers in the eBay south campus office. It goes off whenever someone makes an investment on MicroPlace.com. Some days I will be working at my desk and deep in the middle of a long lawyer’s report about SEC security requirements and, I know you will find this hard to believe, but I start to get bored. But then I hear the cash register sound and it makes me realize that all this hard work, all those late hours, all the trust that eBay put into us is actually worth it. It still doesn’t make me excited to ready SEC documentation, but every time I hear the cash register sound, I know another loan has been enabled and another life has been impacted.We’re hope you’ll join us in working to alleviate global poverty. For the billion people living on less than $1 per day, a loan as small as $30 can mean the difference between standing on a street corner begging for a handout and starting a small business that can provide a lifetime of income. Take Amoin. She went to school in Cote d’Ivoire until she was 12 and her parents could no longer pay for her schooling. That’s when she went to work selling fruit and beans in the local market. Today, she is 29, with her own children, and a lot of experience trading in the market. Amoin took a $550 loan to be able to grow her own palm beans to sell in Adobo’s open market. Her life’s goal is to give her two children the university education that she herself was denied. Her oldest daughter entered school this year, with all expenses covered by the income from Amoin’s business. Please join us today at MicroPlace to make an investment.
Thanks for your time Ashwini!
Published by Jerry Ostradicky on 20 Sep 2008
Published by Michelle Grocke on 20 Sep 2008
Before I start actively contributing to this blog, I thought I should quickly introduce myself…
My name is Michelle Grocke, I’m 24 years old and I just moved to Seattle a few months ago. I graduated from William Smith College in upstate New York with an economics and modern language degree in the Spring of ’06. Immediately after my graduation I moved to Geneva, Switzerland and completed a research internship with the I.L.O.
(the UN specialized agency which seeks the promotion of social justice and internationally recognized human and labor rights).
While at the I.L.O., I edited a few working papers on microcredit and soon discovered how brilliant, how widely successful and how simple this method of eradicating poverty really is! I soon began to immerse myself into any and all literature I could find regarding microcredit – and knew that this was something that I wanted to become and stay involved in for the rest of my life. Side note: If you have not already done so, you should read both Muhammad Yunus’ book Banker to the Poor, and Alex Counts’ book Small Loans, Big Dreams.
Not knowing exactly how to get involved with microcredit I decided to take a break, move to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and go skiing for two seasons – I thought maybe the crisp air and powder would provide some sort of clarity…
Well low and behold it finally did, and that is how I wound up here. After a mere four-day visit to Seattle I realized how involved and active everybody here was with not only microcredit, but with an abundant array of both domestic and global issues. In Jackson I almost always had to follow up “I’m going to Seattle to hopefully get a job working with Microcredit…” with “Oh, okay…well basically Microcredit is….” That’s not the case in Seattle.
In addition to looking for a job, I am currently continuing to educate myself with the ‘what’s new’ in the world of microcredit – and will be posting my findings on myKRO.org. Sorry, I realize this introduction wasn’t exactly short, but now at least you know a little about the newest contributor to myKRO.
