SeaMo is pleased to announce January’s Microfinance and Microbrews at The Pike Brewery (1415 1st Ave, Seattle) on Thursday, January 15th beginning at 5:30pm. This month we are featuring Casey Wilson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Wokai, a new peer-to-peer microfinance lending platform focused on the Chinese market. Casey will be talking about the nuances of microfinance in China.

Microfinance and Microbrews is a once-every-other-month gathering to learn more about microfinance and to meet others who are interested too. There is a $5 suggested donation at the door to help cover the cost of appetizers.

Attention Puget Sound area readers of myKRO.org:

Please join us this Tuesday for a great event featuring the Financial Services for the Poor office of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Here are the details.

SeaMo (www.seattlemicrofinance.org) will be hosting its third “Microfinance and Microbrews” at the Pyramid Ale House in Seattle. Please come and join us to meet others interested in microfinance and to hear from Cheryl Sesnon, the Executive Director of the local microfinance pioneer, Washington CASH, this Wednesday at 5:30pm.

More details: http://www.seattlemicrofinance.org/2008/09/24/microfinance-and-microbrews-october-22nd-featuring-washington-cash/

Facebook event page:  http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=logo#/event.php?eid=44050814736&ref=mf

A couple of days ago I posted about Muhammad Yunus’ optimistic assertions about how well microfinance is weathering the financial crisis. The post prompted a comment from a reader who expressed some concerns about the claim. So, with the Dow touching 7800 today, I wanted to put the question out there for consideration and, hopefully, discussion. Will the global financial crisis hurt microfinance? If you have an opinion, post a comment. If you have data that support one view or another, link to them here. If you have questions of your own, throw them out there.

Finally, here are a couple of articles that contribute to the discussion:

“MFIs Fear Cash Drought”

“The Global Financial Crisis and Microfinance“

At last week’s Clinton Global Initiative, former president Bill Clinton announced the launch of Leapfrog Investments. Leapfrog will invest in local microinsurers who provide insurance services to BoP clientele. (website)

Muhammad Yunus stated at a recent microfinance event, “Microfinance still works. [it hasn’t been] hit by the meltdown process.” If he’s right, and I have not seen any statistics to back it up, then the safest loans to invest in over the last few years would have been the sub-subprime loans. (full article)

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

Did anyone else wake up this morning to find a surprisingly large balance in their Kiva account?

One of the critiques of the Kiva P2P lending model was the delay between when a borrower repaid a loan and when the lender had access to the repaid funds for withdrawal, re-lending, or donating to Kiva. Essentially, a lender would not have access to funds until the full amount of the original loan had been repaid.

Just yesterday Kiva rolled out a new system in which lenders will have access to the loans as the payments are processed. For a more detailed description of the new system, check out Matt Flannery’s post over at SocialEdge. Why is this important? The key benefit is the increased velocity of lending. Rather than repaid funds sitting in a bank account for months, the funds are immediately available to lenders, who, I suspect in most cases, relend the money.

Oh, and if you want to hear about another exciting innovation from Kiva that rolled out yesterday, check out my post over at SeaMo about Kiva Communities .

In yet another sign of its growing success, politicians are evidently hitching their carriage to microfinance–and the African Union wants none of it. “Political leaders or those who declare their active participation in politics be it in government or opposition, are bad economists,” declared an AU commission formed to support the development of microfinance. (more)

This Day, an African website on global affairs, reports new comments from Muhammad Yunus about the role of international financing of MFIs. Yunus was speaking at a conference in Lagos, and reiterated his point from last month’s conference in Mexico City that microfinance should focus on the extremely poor. He also went a step further in calling for greater local funding for microfinance. Yunus’ remarks are bound to make some European and US funders a little nervous. For the complete article: thisdayonline.com