When poor people have access to financial services, they can earn more, build their assets, and cushion themselves against external shocks. Poor households use microfinance to move from everyday survival to planning for the future: they invest in food,clothing, housing, health, and education.

Microfinance means building financial systems that serve the poor. In most developing countries, poor people are the majority of the population, yet they are the least likely to be served by banks. Microfinance is often seen as a marginal sector—a “development” activity that donors, governments, or social investors might care about, but not as part of the country’s mainstream financial system. However, microfinance will reach the maximum number of poor clients only when it is integrated into the financial sector.

Microfinance can pay for itself, and must do so if it is to reach very large numbers of poor people. Most poor people cannot get good financial services that meet their needs because there are not enough strong institutions that provide such services. Strong institutions need to charge enough to cover their costs. Cost recovery is not an end in itself. Rather, it is the only way to reach scale and impact beyond the limited levels that donors can fund. A financially sustainable institution can continue and expand its services over the long term. Achieving sustainability means lowering transaction costs, offering services that are more useful to the clients, and finding new ways to reach more of the unbanked poor.

But what is happening today in the garb of Micro Finance is cheating the poor. MFIs are exploiting the poor by charging very high interest for the loan they take. Moreover only the well to do among the poor have access to most MFIs.This must go a radical change. Micro Finance lenders like World BANK, FWWB, and many others should change their policy -IF THEY REALLY CARE FOR THE POOREST OF THE POOR to give priority to Organizations working for the Disadvantaged.

I thank the SEEP network for Bringing us together to discuss issues like these. And I would like to say that a proper report about this conference be posted for others to learn form this.
i agree with the posting by Alexander. Its is high time MFIs beging to see areas they can contribute to the development of humanity in helping to reduce poverty level and meeting up with social economic condition of the poor.

Every day programs are made, reports about funding for development displayed. Yet the MFIs still borrow to the rich and Africa, the rich uses this aproach in getting richer.

Nigerian plan for poverty Alliviation is to learn from this ideas and other MFIs on how bests to help the poor and the needy not the rich.

For us to achieve the MDGs, we must all come back to the drawing board and network.

The goals are achievable and there is need to sustain these project.

In HIV/AIDS, we must look at it as very challenging issues. We lend to those that we think can pay and sometimes, dont pay. The people living with HIV can do more in sustaining the project as we have the network of people living with HIV and also of importance is for MFIs to link other NGOs/CBOs to access miccrocredit that will be use to start an income generating activities for sustainability. Without waiting and depending on external funding.(Global fund,IMF, World bank and other charity)

Where are we?
Lets all unite and speak development and not lony collecting. The idea of my own NGO will not work if we dont learn form others and unite as community for change. These will all bumerang both directly and indirectly.

The MFIs in the developing countries like Nigeria, should see how they can contribute to the health sector development if not who will be there to access the credit.
There is an adage in Africa that says “ The horse gave birth so that it can be able to stretch its waist” What if the donors are not there, what can we do?

We must live for tomorrow but we all have to start building it now.

Thanks for being in the vanguard of chage

Thank you so much for your acknowledgement and fine points. I wanted to make sure you are aware that we are currently having a larger discussion on this topic at:

http://communities.seepnetwork.org/me_hiv_conf/discussion

Please join us and post further insights on this topic there!

Mary McVay
The SEEP Network

More broadly, it is a movement whose object is “a world in which as many poor and near-poor households as possible have permanent access to an appropriate range of high quality financial services, including not just credit but also savings, insurance, and fund transfers.” Those who promote microfinance generally believe that such access will help poor people out of poverty.

business directory

When a country that maintains a fixed exchange rate is suddenly forced to devalue its currency because of a speculative attack, this is called a currency crisis or balance of payments crisis. When a country fails to pay back its sovereign debt, this is called a sovereign default. While devaluation and default could both be voluntary decisions of the government, they are often perceived to be the involuntary results of a change in investor sentiment that leads to a sudden stop in capital inflows or a sudden increase in capital flight.

It is encouraging to read that recognition is being made of the fact that underlying each issue is education about equality, legislation and priority being given to these issues on international and local levels. As each challenge grows, including the spread of HIV/AIDS, a particular phenomena emerges.

With HIV/AIDS, as women die leaving children behind, grandmothers are stepping up to raise their grandchildren in much the same way they have done when drug misuse affected a family. And families without a stable grandmother, or one who can even attempt to oversee another generation, it is an aunt who may step in. In one case I know, when a sister died from AIDS, her daughter was hidden from her aunt and died from malnutrition. Work with African grandmothers is being done by a foundation in Canada who is connected to the UN, for instance, and it seems that the time is now to bring three generations of families together to support and educate them about their rights and the effect male domination has on national policy, a disease and a family’s future.

If countries would commit to cross-generational education, beginning with those families being devastated by AIDS, and protecting others from HIV/AIDS,perhaps we would advance in ways that create grassroots communities that would supplement women’s and girls’ organizations. Including male family members is not necessarily a first step, but certainly is a follow-up step depending on the cultural mores with which we are dealing.Micro-finance works among women, and they often create teams in a village that monitor familial behavior to a women’s advantage (a husband beating a wife is confronted by a team, for example, and ordered to stop). This micro-finance phenomena can provide a viable model for an HIV/AIDS Generational model.
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Please, don’t delete guaranteed cash advance, it’s my job

Nyabinda Naman O.
Dear all, HIV is accompaniment of human life and there is no way we can do without it once it has cropped into our lives. In Kenya HIV is part of the major problems we are trying to solve. GOvernment, NGO’s, private sectors and well wishers are working throughout the clock to make sure HIV prevalence is tamed at all levels of human coexistance. I do belive and concur with the rest of discussion that we need to work with the available resource to make sure that country’s both human and immaterial resource are taken care of and protected irrespective of HIV interferance.
Thanks
Naman Nyabinda

Dear Colleagues

When there are metrics with a community focus, it becomes a lot easier to understand what is being accomplished with scarce resources. Community Analytics (CA) takes into account all the resources and constraints of a community together with the quality of life … and by tracking this over time learns about the progress of the community. People … human capital … is arguably the greatest of resources, and of course, HIV-AIDS has reduced this capital dramatically. Each community is different, but the loss of human capital resulting from HIV-AIDS is a ubiquitous problem. How best to progress out of this situation depends on many factors … and the specifics of a community … but it will often be useful to help in a material way for the older people to look after and bring up the younger children. In many places it will be good if faith based groups can organize to coordinate the work and management of resources and services.

One of my favorite initiatives helping orphans in Africa is the Carpenter’s Kids program of the Diocese of Central Tanganyika in Dodoma, Tanzania. A small amount of money is helping to get vulnerable children into schools for education and they are fed daily by adults in the community … low cost … great impact!

Sincerely

Peter Burgess
Tr-Ac-Net Inc. Community Analytics (CA)

MF and ED professionals are familiar with how Yunus started Grameen. Basically, he took a look around and said how can I help? In each of our spheres of influence and environments, we can reach out and do. Poverty is allievated when people make it a personal responsibility to address it. This is what appears to be happening with Peter’s example of Carpenter’s Kids above. This is what happened with AMPATH and it’s initiative to tackle the devestation HIV was/is having on Kenyan communities. Address the need and work to continually learn and improve.

I returned from a trip to Kenya a little while ago to vitis the AMPATH program mentioned by Naiomi on Jan 10 on this discussion thread. Shree, I appreciated your “thanks” and am responding to your comment that we rarely come across certain initiatives taken “by the people.” In the SEEP HIV guidelines, we put forth a concept of 2 primary goals of microfinance and microenterprise development in HIV impacted communities:
1) Economic security
2) sustainable community safety nets
This second goal is in recognition that some people will always need support, that there will always be peoplel who need support sometime, and that communities had or can develop ways to support the most vulnerable people among them – it’s just that HIV has over-run the community and family support systems.

So, here’s an example from Kenya, Rift Valley:

A development program stimulating passion fruit growth assisted a “plateau” community to grow passion fruit. The organization provided technical advice, linked the community to markets, and linked them to an MFI that lent the farmers money for seedlings, stakes, ropes, fertilizer, etc. This community was living poorly, but had many assets – land of between 4-10 acres, low HIV rate, strong social networks through traditional ethnic ties and through the church. Within a few months of contact with the development organiztion, 500 farmers had organized themselves into 25 groups to access services, and within a year average incomes had increased expanentially – between 5 and 10 times what they were earning from maize. The “technical” advice included “farming as a family business” a social training and approach that helps families understand their farm, finances and everyone’s contribution to the farm – it helps the family plan how they will spend new money, who will get bank accounts and hwo the money will be controled. Great tool for gender equity adn intergenerational knowledge transfer. Only 1-2 men started using the money for drinking and were talking about getting additional wives. The group leaders (also church leaders) reigned the men in, telling them if they didn’t straighten up all the money woudl go to the wives from now on and/or they would be kicked out. The men straightened up.

Meanwhile, down in the valley, is where the men wnet to drink – illegal alcohol, brewed by single mothers, renters who run bars and engage in prostitution to earch a living. Having seen the benefits of the passion fruit – the real fruit – the men up on the plateau atempted to approach the women in the valley to join the initiative. The concept is for the “plateau” group to establish a commercial nursury, advisory service and pick-up point for the buyers. They would do this on the road between the plateau and the valley – perfect, value chain development, win-win idea. The men were thrown out of the valley, “stoned” by the women, who were threatened by the church coming in, judging them and trying to shut down their businesses. So, the men turned to teh chief – a women – adn the district officer – also a woman – and asked them to approach the valley neighbors. The valey women were receiptive this time and have agreed inprinciple to grow passion fruit and close down the breweries if the fruit earns them more.

This example is something that I see going on all around in Africa, when people are strong enough and have opportunities to share. It is a great example of how you can reach a vulnerable populaiton by helping an easier to reach group. If we understand this more, I think we can learn to help more people like the “plateau” leaders to reach out effectively and quickly.

Are others aware of similar cases of spontaneous or supported “sustainble community safety nets”?

Mary McVay
Director, The Value Initiative
Facilitator, The Enterprise Development Exchange
The SEEP Network
mcvay@seepnetwork.org
708-660-8140 (Central time, USA)