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Key Principles of Microfinance
As microfinance takes shape, the following are the principles that have been defined by CGAP and endorsed by the G8 according to the new book - Access for All: Building Inclusive Financial Systems (a world bank publication - http://www.gizmag.com/go/5112)
CGAP is a consortium of 31 public and private development agencies working together to expand access to financial services for the poor, referred to as microfinance. These principles were developed and endorsed by CGAP and its 31 member donors, and further endorsed by the Group of Eight leaders at the G8 Summit on 10 June 2004 (Sea Island, Georgia, USA).
1 Poor people need a variety of financial services, not just loans. In addition to credit, they want savings, insurance, and money transfer services.
2 Microfinance is a powerful tool to fight poverty. Poor households use financial services to raise income, build their assets, and cushion themselves against external shocks.
3 Microfinance means building financial systems that serve the poor. Microfinance will reach its full potential only if it is integrated into a country’s mainstream financial system.
4 Microfinance can pay for itself, and must do so if it is to reach very large numbers of poor people. Unless microfinance providers charge enough to cover their costs, they will always be limited by the scarce and uncertain supply of subsidies from governments and donors.
5 Microfinance is about building permanent local financial institutions that can attract domestic deposits, recycle them into loans, and provide other financial services.
6 Microcredit is not always the answer. Other kinds of support may work better for people who are so destitute that they are without income or means of repayment.
7 Interest rate ceilings hurt poor people by making it harder for them to get credit. Making many small loans costs more than making a few large ones. Interest rate ceilings prevent microfinance institutions from covering their costs, and thereby choke off the supply of credit for poor people.
8 The job of government is to enable financial services, not to provide them directly. Governments can almost never do a good job of lending, but they can set a supporting policy environment.
9 Donor funds should complement private capital, not compete with it. Donor subsides should be temporary start-up support designed to get an institution to the point where it can tap private funding sources, such as deposits.
10 The key bottleneck is the shortage of strong institutions and managers. Donors should focus their support on building capacity.
11 Microfinance works best when it measures—and discloses—its performance. Reporting not only helps stakeholders judge costs and benefits, but it also improves performance. MFIs need to produce accurate and comparable reporting on financial perfomance (e.g., loan repayment and cost recovery) as well as social performance (e.g., number and poverty level of clients being served).
Seems like the last two points are the action items here. Is there a role for the DV to support projects that build capactiy and/or enable better reporting?
There is a role that DV program can play. By applying technology to achieve the last two.
Themix - http://www.themix.org/en/index.html - is already offering some standardized reporting. I cannot comment how much of no. 11 it achieves. The difficult part is when interpreting the reports in the local context. Indicators vary from country to country, as they vary from one MFI to another. One way this can be achieved is by developing a framework that will enable local users to define their own key reporting indicators as to performance besides the standardized global reporting that I think is often off the mark.
One way that of achieving capacity building is by using technology to train the institutional managers. This can be easily achieved by using web streaming technology as it happens for the several courses that are available online at Stanford. Having a service that delivers training in different areas such as HR, finance, business management, innovation and technology, entrepreneurship to mention but a few will be a good way to enhance various capacity building efforts. The efforts can be more broader in reach if the courses are are delivered in several languages and on several platforms.
As a side note, given private equity investors and donors as providers of capacity building, I will choose private equity investors any day.
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