I’m sure everybody knows about the major earthquake that has devastated Haiti, killing thousands of people. Over the last week I have seen support coming from all angles, from mainstream sites like Facebook, BBC, CNN, celebrities like Ben Stiller donating through their charities, to major non-profits in the area like Yele Haiti and the Red Cross.  It is great to see so many different companies and organizations contributing to help the cause.  Although the earthquake was major, it was only a little bigger than earthquakes in the US, but caused an expontentially higher amount of damange and casualties.  I think this earthquake opened peoples’ eyes about the impact that natural disasters can have on developing countries.  Similar to the Tsunami in Thailand earlier this decade, people have joined from all over to help donate money.  Although a lot of the rebuilding will be coming from the donations that people will be making, one of the next steps will be for people in Haiti to help themselves rebuild.  I think there will be a big microfinance push as things start to get cleared up in Haiti.  With all of the relief organizations helping out, it’s only a matter of time that microfinance will take over.  In the last week alone, there have been a lot of microfinance organizations that have been helping the cause.  I decided that I would share some of the ones I have heard about.

-Alex Counts from the Grameen Foundation talks about the next step to help Haiti rebuild:

-Kiva’s field partner Esperanza wrote an update:

On Wednesday,20 January, at 6:00AM a 6.1 magnitude aftershock struck Haiti (with an epicenter approximately 35 miles north of the capital, Port-au-Prince). This is the largest aftershock yet and it comes just eight days after the tragic 7.1 magnitude earthquake hit the capital. As a result of the aftershock, many unstable buildings collapsed; however, we are fortunate they were empty as many survivors of the original quake have been sleeping on the streets. We ask for continued prayers and support for the people of Haiti.
In light of this disaster, Esperanza is partnering with various doctors and medical volunteers in the towns of Elias Pina and Jimani, located on the border with Haiti. Loads of water, food, personal hygiene items and medicines have been shipped to these areas. We are also working with our already established network of pastors and church leaders who are currently preparing sites in Port-au-Prince to receive aid directly into the country.
As the situation in Haiti becomes dire, we are still in need of cash donations from our partners abroad. Monetary gifts of $40 to Esperanza´s Disaster Relief initiatives will provide a family with its basic necessities (food, bottled water, healthcare kits, etc.). For more information on how to help, please contact the Esperanza Disaster Response Group at disasterresponse@esperanza.org

-Fonkoze, an MFI in Haiti, has an Earthquake News and Updates page that they are updating with information from the ground as well as some photos that their staff have taken.  Whole Foods has donated 1 million dollars to Fonkoze to help out the microfinance effort on the ground.

-In addition to MFIs and other non-profits helping the efforts, there are also local microfinance networks such as SeaMO, Seattle Greendrinks, Global Washington and Re-Vision Labs who are putting on an event here in Seattle to help raise funds and awareness about what is going on in Haiti.
You can RSVP for Washington for Haiti: A benefit to aid the relief efforts of Fonkoze on their facebook event page

I had to pleasure of traveling to San Francisco a few weeks ago for the Inman Real Estate Conference. Though most of my trip involved socializing with real estate folks and working, I made some time for talking to people in the microfinance industry while I was there and wanted to put together a few thoughts as a result. I’m annoyed it took me so long to get to this post, but better late than never.

I took Monday off and had coffee at Coffee Bar with April Newman from SVMN in the morning. We had a great chat for a good hour and a half and I came away very impressed with her knowledge and passion. She is stepping down from her role as Interim Director of SVMN in order to work with an organization more hands with improving the lives of others, so if you know someone who may be a good fit for the SNMN job, let her know. I didn’t know it at the time, but Coffee Bar in the Mission was about 3 or 4 blocks from Kiva’s offices. Randomly, a Kiva Fellows meeting with 3 Kive employees started about half hour after I got there and April introduced me to JD (who runs the Fellows program). I stuck around until they were done, walked back to their office with them, and got a quick tour of Kiva headquarters. I posted a few pictures via Twitter, but don’t know how to search twitter to find those tweets or else I’d re-post them here. Thanks to JD for giving me the tour!

That same day (Monday), I met Kirsten Weiss for coffee in the late afternoon. Kirsten has been a contributor on myKRO.org for quite some time. It’s always good to put a real face to the name of the person who I’ve conversed with for months via e-mail. I’d never even spoken to her on the phone prior to my trip, but it wasn’t difficult to strike up a conversation given her fascinating background doing microfinance in a number of countries overseas (including Afghanistan) for ShoreBank International prior to coming back to the states to do financial consulting. I look forward to seeing more of her interviews on myKRO.

Later in the week I grabbed coffee down at South Beach Cafe with Courtney McColgan, one of the co-founders of Wokai. Where as most people I know were drawn to the human side of microfinance — the touching stories of the individuals and families touched on a day to day basis — it was the economic development component that initially attracted Courtney to microfinance (she worked at Morgan Stanley). Particularly with a country as vast and underdeveloped as China, improving access to capital had the capability to improve lives on a large scale — and she wanted to help facilitate access to capital to the working poor. She gave me more background on the creation of Wokai and her current role at Draper Fisher Jurvetson working on solutions for clean technology. Lastly, one thing I definitely related with her on — being a venture philanthropist would be the coolest job ever!

A few thoughts I’d like to throw out there that came up:

• Does Kiva have any plans to license some of their underlying lending software to other niche microfinance lending platforms such as Wokai or OptInNow (though both sites have already built their own)? It seems very inefficient to continue to spend development time and resources, particularly when the dollars are spent from donated funds, toward something that’s already been built.
• 501 (c) 3 status – is there room for an overarching non profit focused on microfinance that niche microfinance organizations like Lumana Credit could branch out from? Still let each organization develop and build their own brand, but cut out the overhead of each organization going through the 501 (c) 3 paperwork.
• What sort of open-source initiatives for the microfinance industry are underway? Is there someone working on Wordpress themes optimized for microfinance institutions? Are there even microfinance institutions using Wordpress as their content management system?

To conclude, it was simply an amazing trip filled with talking to some great people. Further, awareness for microfinance is growing; it seemed microfinance and Kiva continued to be brought up amidst my real estate conversations. For instance, I found Garron Selliken at mRealty to be a huge advocate, and had lunch with Haley (who works for Garron and is working on TheOctopus) last Friday as a result. Maybe it’s because I constantly promote microfinance via Twitter and my blog, but I think there’s more to it. After 25+ years, I think microfinance is finally close to reaching mainstream awareness — and articles like this in TIME magazine are only going to speed up the process.

I just came across a cool site called Microfundo that applies the methods of microfinance to the music industry.  Their mission is to support the entrepreneurial activities of independent musicians from developing countries around the world – championing undiscovered musicians who would otherwise not have the means to develop their music careers.  Basically Microfundo is a Kiva for music.  Anybody can go to their website and browse through their various campaigns to choose a musician to lend money to.  Here’s how it works:

Choose a Musician’s Campaign, Lend, Get Repaid
1. Music Fans like you browse Campaigns of Musicians and choose an artist to lend to. When you lend, using Paypal or your credit card, Microfundo collects the funds and then passes them along to the artist once they’ve reached their goal.
2. Over time the artist is able to repay the loan via sales of digital downloads of their music that is distributed through Microfundo’s media partners at Natonal Geographic and Mondomix.
3. When you get your money back you can re-lend to another artist Campaign or choose to purchase their artists’ new releases or you can simply keep your money.

I think this is a great concept, especially for those that are musicall inclined.  Microfundo targets a niche group of lenders, so I’m not sure how scalable it will be, but ultimately I think it has a lot of potential.

For those who don’t quite know what microfinance is yet, here’s a great video from Unitus:

[via Seamo via Wokai]

Here is an interesting article by Dr. Bashir Mahmud Ellias that discusses microfinance and its relationship with dowries.

Over the last two to three decades rural Bangladeshi society has experienced a complex range of developments. Among these, NGOs, micro-finance institutions and garment industries have become the major agents of change in the lives of rural Bangladeshi women. Women’s increased access to independent sources of finance, through participation in outside paid employment or through micro-credit, is usually taken as one of the main indicators of the improvement of women’s status and of women’s empowerment.
However, a puzzle remains: if these positive changes have resulted in women’s “empowerment” , why has there not been the kind of improvements in women’s position that might be expected, such as the reduction or abolition of dowry payments, or a reduction in domestic violence? Indeed, if anything these tend to be going in the opposite direction. Dowry amounts continue to rise, as does the associated violence against women.

To read the rest of the article, check out Dr. Bashir Mahmud Ellias’ blog.

For those passionate about microfinance and alleviating poverty, there is an open seat on the Board of Directors at SeaMo — more details about the position and its responsibilities can be found here.

I’ve been spending a fair amount of time with Twitter lately (you can follow me here), largely for my day job at Zillow.com to communicate with the active community of real estate agents. However, part of my personal time on Twitter is now spent following the microfinance conversation and networking with others passionate about the subject. Though I don’t tweet too often about microfinance myself, I do re-tweet many of the interesting microfinance tweets to my followers. Every day, it seems there is someone new talking about microfinance that shows up in my tweetdeck filter for “microfinance”, which is simply fantastic to see. Here are a few of the more active microfinance tweeters that I follow:

• Microfinance – this account simply auto-tweets activity from Kiva, but worth following to get a feel for the amount of activity on Kiva
• SeaMoMicro – I know Ryan Calkins from SeaMo in real life (we’re both in Seattle) and he is certainly one of the more active tweeters. Definitely worth following.
• Kiva – The staff at Kiva.org posts updates here
• Casey Wilson – The CEO and co-founder of Wokai.org (a lending platform Jerry first covered in October) is a fairly active tweeter. I had the chance to meet her a couple weeks ago, and she’s focused on bringing microfinace to China in a large way
• bhalchander
• mfinsights
• MFIConnect

Of course, this is only scratching the surface of those discussing microfinance on twitter. Who else is tweeting about microfinance that you follow?

I just set up a twitter account for myKRO — you can follow the blog at www.twitter.com/mykroorg! For now, it’ll just be a place to get updates for posts written on myKRO, but we may post other updates there every now and then.

And if whoever owns the twitter handle “mykro” sees this and would like to donate it back to myKRO.org, let me know

I found a cool post on Jigaroo about Yoga Gives Back, a non-profit that combines yoga with microfinance.  Yoga Gives back teams up with the Grameen Bank to help get loans to recipients.  With the slogan “For the cost of two yoga classes, you can save a life” I think that this is a pretty cool concept.  It uses the Grameen group model of microfinance, but applies to the lenders rather than the recipients.  Yoga Gives Back works with a specific group of people whom it teaches microfinance to, with the hopes of spreading awareness. 

There’s a thought provoking post over at the Kiva Fellows Blog by Rob C. Here is one excerpt that got me thinking:

One day Sulton Kurbonov stopped at the MicroInvest office to make a loan payment and I had a chance to meet with this soft-spoken father of seven.  He explained that he had taken out a loan to purchase a color television set and my initial reaction was one of disdain.  You’re struggling to make ends meet yet you’re taking out loans to buy a television?

After some reflection I realized what a patronizing attitude I had taken.   Here’s a man who has lived honestly and worked hard for more than 30 years for little reward other than the sustenance of his family.   Is he entitled to allocate some of his income for entertainment?   And is he really much different than those of us who finance a car we couldn’t afford to buy in cash?

It’s fairly easy to jump to conclusions based on little but false assumptions, but until you know the facts and have a chance to think about an issue from both sides, you are in no position to judge anyone about anything.