Congrats to Casey Wilson and the Wokai team for landing an appearance on Morning Call Bloomberg this past week!! Here’s the video:

Casey Wilson recently had a great email that she sent out about the recent articles about Kiva in the NY times that I thought was worth posting:

You might have read Stephanie Strom’s article “Confusion Where Money Lent via Kiva Goes” in the New York Times a few days ago.  This issue has been making the rounds since David Roodman’s post a month ago.  As a fellow “peer-to-peer” microfinance organization, we thought it was important for us to follow up with our own supporters on this issue.

To be clear, contributions on Wokai go to microfinance institutions (our “Field Partners”) in rural China, who are in charge of distributing the loans to the borrowers and collecting repayment.  A borrower can in fact receive a loan from a Field Partner prior the time the loan is “100% funded” on the Wokai website.  Below are two excerpts from Wokai’s FAQ that might shed more light on the issue.

Can a recipient’s loan start before it is 100% funded?

Yes. Once a Field Partner has posted a recipient’s profile online, Wokai Field Partners can use their own capital to issue that recipient’s loan. Wokai then reimburses this capital to the Field Partner once the recipient’s loan has been 100% funded. If the recipient’s loan is canceled for any reason, the recipient will no longer be designated as a “Wokai recipient” and that Field Partner will permanently fund the loan with its own capital reserves.

What happens if a recipient’s loan does not get 100% funded by the final fundraising day?

If a recipient’s loan is not 100% funded by the time it reaches zero “Days Left”, then Wokai will either extend the recipient’s fundraising period by one month or, if there is any specific reason why contributors are choosing not to fund the recipient, Wokai will cancel the recipient and allow contributors to select a new recipient to support.

Wokai is committed to being transparent in its processes.  To that end, we discuss our field partner relationships right on our “About” pages.  We even received credit from David Roodman in his original post for being very open about our relationships with field partners.

To read more about what Wokai does, visit their site at Wokai.org

[via WokaiSeattle on Twitter]

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.

With the spotlight on China with the 2008 Olympics Games, I naturally started to look at how China is doing in the microfinance sector.   However, to my surprise, there was actually very little information about microfinance in China.  I scoured the internet for hours, and could only find a handful of sites that had anything relevant.  So, I thought I would highlight some of my findings:

I was expecting there to be a lot more, but I was only able to find the following MFIs in China:

• ARDPAS – Association for Rural Development of Poor Areas in Sichuan
• CFPA – China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation
• CZWSDA – Chifeng Zhaowuda Women’s Sustainable Development Association
• OI China – Opportunity International China
• PATRA Hunchun
• PATRA Yanbian

Most of the articles I found were fairly old, so I here is a list of some of the more recent articles:

• Microfinance in China: Micro vs. Mandarin
• History of Microcredit in China
• Social entrepreneurship in Sichuan: Interview with Meg Young of Ecologia, a sustainable development program
• China Life Insurance Company Limited Introduces Microinsurance Products in Nine Provinces
• Sustainable Development in China
• What Microfinance Means for China’s Growth
• Microfinance Institutions To Debut In China’s Zhejiang Province

-Wokai
Wokai is a “capital-contributing microfinance intermediary in the China microfinance field.” They have good information on the site, and they have a great blog that talks a lot about microfinance in China.  Definitely a great place to start if you are looking for info about China.
-Mix Market
“The MIX MARKET ™ provides information to sector actors and the public at large on microfinance institutions (MFIs) worldwide, public and private funds that invest in microfinance, MFI networks, raters/external evaluators, advisory firms, and governmental and regulatory agencies.”  The Mix Market is very useful if you want to dig deeper into specific organizations and countries.
-China Asociation of Microfinance (CAM)
Although the website is a little hard to navigate, CAM has a lot of current events and news feeds about microfinance associations in China.

Like I said earlier, I wasn’t able to find very much information pertaining to microfinance in China.  If anybody has any other good websites with relevant information, please let me know.