Microfinance, Innovations, Sustainable Development - World

World Council of Credit Unions

Gerard — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 23:52:55 GMT

World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) is the leading international trade association and development agency for credit unions. WOCCU promotes the sustainable development of credit unions and other financial cooperatives around the world to empower people through access to high quality and affordable financial services. WOCCU advocates on behalf of the global credit union system before international organizations and works with national governments to improve legislation and regulation. Its technical assistance programs introduce new tools and technologies to strengthen credit unions' financial performance and increase their outreach.

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World Concern: Reaching 153,000 AIDS orphans

Gerard — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 17:59:45 GMT

While it's sometimes hard to quantify success, one thing is certain – the ripple effect and long-term effects of good development work impact more people for generations to come than any of us will know.

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GCC companies need to focus more on innovation management for business success

Gerard — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:40:02 GMT

Many GCC businesses are struggling during these tough economic times and are even missing an opportunity to grow, because they are not focusing sufficiently on Innovation Management says an expert in the UAE.

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Nigeria's top banker wins international recognition

Gerard — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 19:21:56 GMT

Nigeria is frequently cited as one of the most corrupt countries in the world, but its central banker has won two international banking awards. Mallam Lamido Aminu Sanusi has been named as the Central Bank Governor of 2010 for both the African continent and the entire world, by the prestigious Banker Magazine.

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Three Innovation Takeaways from Asia

Gerard — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 09:18:29 GMT

The West is overly discounting Asia's growth potential. Innovation has never been more accessible. We're on the verge of a golden age of innovation. The human side of innovation must be addressed. More focus must go to solving the first mile problem... Written by Scott Anthony from Singapore

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2010: Rapidly developing countries are innovation champions

Gerard — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 09:04:03 GMT

Top emerging economies are forging research collaborations to help the less well-off. The idea that poorer countries should catch up economically with wealthier ones before spending heavily on R&D was challenged by a report released last week. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) report contradicts theories widely held by development professionals and international organizations such as the World Bank.

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Afganistan: Microfinance faces hurdles in empowering women

Gerard — Tue, 04 Jan 2011 08:42:42 GMT

More than 1.5mn loans worth $831mn have been given out in the past seven years, said the Microfinance Investment Support Facility for Afghanistan (MISFA), which was set up by the government in 2003 to coordinate the sector. Thirty years of conflict have shattered Afghanistan’s economy and infrastructure, leaving two-thirds of the roughly 30mn population illiterate and at least a third in dire poverty.

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India's Poor Reel Under Microfinance Debt Burden

Gerard — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 08:19:30 GMT

One of the most popular programs for helping the world's poor has gone sour in India. Microcredit, the practice of making small loans to very poor people, grew into a multibillion-dollar business. But microfinance companies have been accused of predatory lending and collection practices so harsh that they drove some borrowers to suicide. One state government in India has enacted legislation that will, in effect, put the microlenders out of business.

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Good News Bank Story? Global Sustainable Banking Network Expands

Gerard — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 08:11:31 GMT

The Global Alliance for Banking on Values, a network of the world's leading sustainable banks, announces four new members today from South America, North America, and Europe. The banks join nine founding banks committed to building a better financial future in challenging times.

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International Financial Corporation (IFC) to Provide Assistance to Crisis Hit Microfinance Sector

Gerard — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 19:54:41 GMT

In an attempt to revive the crisis struck Microfinance sector, the International Financial Corporation, IFC a private sector arm of the World Bank Group is exploring avenues to facilitate fund flows to MFIs. This is an important development in the wake of the industry suffering continuous setbacks.

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Shanti Microfinance Launches $772K MFI Fund

Gerard — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 02:24:36 GMT

Shanti Microfinance, a not-for-profit organization, is raising a $772,000 (£500,000) fund backed by UK and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The firm has already disbursed £10k (USD) and plans to start its operations in Gujarat before moving to Mumbai next year.

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Why biodiversity loss and climate change are equal threats

Gerard — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 16:56:47 GMT

Our biggest ally will be lost if we do not protect and enhance biodiversity in forests and other systems. Since the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the media and many organisations have pursued as separate narratives the issues of climate, biodiversity and sustainable development. One of the changes this year, at a UN level, has been recognition that this does not make sense.

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Global launch of GEO Legacy Guidance for sustainable golf development

Gerard — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 16:40:57 GMT

The Golf Environment Organization's GEO Legacy Guidance launched to widespread acclaim following previews at the Asia Pacific Golf Summit in Bangkok and the European Golf Course Owners Association Conference in London.

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Developing Countries Get Grants for Sustainable Development

Gerard — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 16:31:09 GMT

The Environmental Economics Unit at the School of Business, Economics and Law at the University of Gothenburg is being granted SEK 73 million from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), to continue to support six environmental economics research centres in Africa, Central America and China for the period 2011-2014.

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Technology: IBM predicts five big tech innovations coming by 2015

Gerard — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 16:21:00 GMT

IBM unveils its fifth annual "Next Five in Five" -- a list of innovations with the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years. The Next Five in Five is based on market and societal trends expected to transform our lives, as well as emerging technologies from IBM's Labs around the world that can make these innovations possible.

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Opinions: How Microfinance Lost its Soul

Gerard — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 16:46:20 GMT

Microfinance has lost its soul. Six fundamental shifts in the practice of microfinance have left it operating more like a for-profit bank and less like an innovative pro-poor movement.

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Facebook for farmers: Technology empowers China's rural workers

Gerard — Sun, 19 Dec 2010 21:12:34 GMT

China Mobile's Nongxintong - or farming information service - launched four years ago. The company is currently focusing on expanding its delivery in China's west and south-west regions. "Building the mobile network and covering most of the country's administrative villages, we realised that there was only a network signal. In rural areas, this is not enough," explains Liu Jing, a local manager for the service at China Mobile.

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Waste as energy - a key trend for the sustainable industry in 2011

Gerard — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 20:45:39 GMT

Cascadia Capital, an investment bank serving both public and private growth companies around the world, has published its predictions for sustainable industries in 2011. One of the four predictions is that waste-to-energy technologies will grow and become part of mainstream society.

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G20, Basel III and Its Implications for the World Banking System

Gerard — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 20:57:58 GMT

The Group of 20 Summit scheduled for November in Seoul will provide a forum for a wide range of economic and fiscal issues, ranging from World Bank governance to fossil fuel subsidies.

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World Bank chief to launch carbon market fund

Gerard — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:55:04 GMT

World Bank President Robert Zoellick is set to launch a new multi-million dollar fund in Mexico on Wednesday to help emerging market countries set up their own carbon markets, the bank said on Tuesday.

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Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes launches Jumo, social network for social activism

Gerard — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 03:09:05 GMT

Hughes, who left Facebook in 2007 to become the Obama campaign's director of online organizing, soft-launched Jumo last March. Jumo was designed to let users find, follow and support the causes important to them, and with 3,500 organizations on board at launch, would-be philanthropists should be able to find and follow something of interest upon joining.

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New Evaluation Finds Microfinance Operations Have Had Difficulty in Reaching the Very Poor

Gerard — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 20:18:46 GMT

A meta-evaluation on microfinance released by the Evaluation Cooperation Group of international financial institutions reports that microfinance operations have had difficulty in reaching the very poor.

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An appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales

Gerard — Sat, 27 Nov 2010 21:30:26 GMT

Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia is appealing for donations to support the activity of the open encyclopedia

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Google: New Internet Traffic Record

Gerard — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 21:43:13 GMT

The internet is growing fast, but Google is growing even faster. According to online security company Arbor Networks, Google now represents an average 6.4 percent of all internet traffic. This is a new record for Google, as it gained more than 1 percent of all internet traffic share since January. Now, only one global ISP handles more traffic, and a lot of that traffic is Google's traffic, anyway. The number is even more incredible if you consider that internet traffic is growing at a staggering 40 to 45 percent each year, and Google is still gaining market share.

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Zambia: Gender and Rural Finance workshop at Lusaka

Gerard — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 21:57:14 GMT

The grant funded a one day workshop in Lusaka to look at gender issues in rural microfinance programmes. 43 people participated in the workshop, including managers and gender specialists from government ministries, financial institutions, community based organizations and NGOs, donors and colleges. There was also participation from IFAD and FAO.

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Microfinance: Little loans, big trouble

Gerard — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 22:27:39 GMT

Microfinance was supposed to mean economic empowerment for the poorest of the poor, many of them female villagers living in India's southeastern state of Andhra Pradesh. Instead, the sector has spiralled into crisis in recent weeks, where the state is blaming 57 recent suicides on aggressive loan collectors.

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Opportunity International Encourages Citizen Diplomacy and Economic Empowerment

Gerard — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 22:17:24 GMT

Claudia Kennedy, Member of Opportunity's Board of Advisors and First Woman U.S. Army Lieutenant General, Encourages Individuals to Recognize Their Power to Improve People's Lives Around the World.

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Lebanon: ranks 49th globally for microfinance environment

Gerard — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 03:58:56 GMT

The Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Microfinance Index ranked Lebanon in 49th place among 54 countries worldwide and in last place among 14 countries in the Middle East and Africa (MENA) in terms of the environment for microfinance.

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WAM: Women Advancing Microfinance International

Gerard — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 21:21:32 GMT

WAM began in 2003 after women professionals in the microfinance industry, most of them based in Washington, DC, began meeting, at first informally in each others' homes. This growing group of WAM Founders came together to discuss areas of common concern, to decide if a more formal organization made sense, to explore what such an organization might do to support women who work in the microfinance industry and, ultimately, to support the development of the industry itself. After several months of planning and program design, WAM was formally launched in October 2003. Membership has grown steadily since.

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LemonWay: Exploring new ways to bank

Gerard — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 08:59:15 GMT

Lemon Way is an Independent Software Vendor that helps banks build a differentiated competitive advantage with innovating solutions based on mobile devices or TV channels. The software suite Wonderbank enables banks to provide their customers robust, secure, transactional solutions for routine and advanced banking enquiries.

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For the unbanked, is mobile money cheap enough?

Gerard — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 08:53:33 GMT

Claudia McKay and Mark Pickens from CGAP have pulled together a comprehensive global pricing study on banking services targeting poor, unbanked and underbanked people in Africa, Asia and Brazil. The study examines pricing for services targeting unbanked and underbanked poor people in 10 countries. The conclusion: mobile banking and other forms of branchless banking are cheaper than traditional banking, but the gap between the two may not be as wide as some may think.

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Big concerns over small loans

Gerard — Sat, 06 Nov 2010 17:03:50 GMT

The recent controversy surrounding the microfinance sector has entirely eclipsed the fact that it is the first effort in India to have delivered financial services to remote corners of the country in a self-sustaining manner. The stakes are high for India’s poor, and we have to pave the way for orderly growth in the sector. Here is our view on some key issues that have featured in the current debate.

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Europe: Google, Facebook to face tougher EU privacy rules

Gerard — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 17:18:50 GMT

The European Union (EU) wants stronger privacy rules to give Internet users more control over how social-networking sites such as Facebook, or search engines such as Google use their personal information.

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Opportunity International: Giving the Poor a Working Chance

Gerard — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 16:49:10 GMT

Opportunity co-founder and former president of Bristol Myers International Corporation, the late Al Whittaker, encountered poverty as he travelled throughout the world in the 1960’s and 70’s. He asked the people he met: “What do you need?” They replied: "Work. With jobs, we will solve our own problems."

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Probanx - Core Banking Software - Microfinance Software

Gerard — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 22:56:44 GMT

Probanx Information Systems specializes in development of software for the financial institutions, offering multi-currency and multi-lingual banking systems with a large variety of modules, based on the latest technologies. We install and support turn-key international Banking Software and Microfinance Software solutions for retail banks, commercial banks, Internet banks and microfinance banks.

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Middle East And North Africa "Social Entrepreneurs Of The Year"

Gerard — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 21:38:14 GMT

Two Social Entrepreneurs one from Morocco and one from Tunisia - were recognized as leading social innovators during a plenary session at the World Economic Forum on the Middle East and North Africa, Marrakech, Morocco on 26 October. The awards were conferred by Hilde Schwab, Co-Founder and Chairperson of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.

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Branchless Banking 2010: Is the hype justified?

Gerard — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 17:23:23 GMT

After several years of very high profile attention on mobile money and other branchless banking schemes, we think it’s time to test the hype. Or more accurately, we’ve wanted to for awhile. But acquiring good data is really, really hard. We’ve been unable to say in anything but a fragmented, mostly anecdotal way whether the unbanked really use branchless banking, what they use it for, if it saves them any money, and what more they might want (but aren’t getting yet). Just because we are excited about branchless banking doesn’t mean it is living up to the promises we make on its behalf.

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CGAP: Mobile Banking is Reaching Millions of Economically Excluded in Poor Countries

Gerard — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 17:17:10 GMT

A significant number of people using new technologies such as mobile phones to access financial services in developing countries are completely new clients for the financial services industry, according to new research by CGAP. The growing interest of so-called branchless banking in recent years has, until now, largely lacked data showing whether it delivers on potential to bring the poor into the formal economy.

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Book: The Case for Sustainable Business as Good Business

Gerard — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 15:29:08 GMT

In their book "Sustainable Excellence", Aron Cramer and Zachary Karabell make a compelling case for why a focus on sustainability -- whether it concerns, for example, climate change, energy consumption or labor relations -- is now a form of enlightened self-interest for businesses. For starters, commodity prices have been soaring as investors wake up to a world marked by rapid population growth and overstretched resources.

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While the current attacks on microfinance are unwarranted, overblown claims about it also need to be tempered

Gerard — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:46:26 GMT

Microfinance has had a quick slide down the popularity charts— from being celebrated as a magic wand against poverty to being condemned as a business riddled with loan sharks.

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The Rise of Sustainable Investing for Institutions

Gerard — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:09:28 GMT

Why the time is right for sustainable thinking by pension funds and institutional investors: When Roger Urwin, global head of investment content at Towers Watson, the investment consultant, turns his mind to a subject, the pensions world listens. Urwin, one of the most influential investment advisors around, has worked with many of the world’s largest retirement schemes. His recent attention to the theme of sustainable investing is notable because of his experience in the reality of pension fund practice and governance.

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The Rigidity Of Microcredit

Gerard — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 14:56:40 GMT

Participants gathered at Deutsche Bank’s Wall Street office for the second day of the Microfinance Impact and Innovation Conference. Panelists included both academics and practitioners, sharing research and experiences from the field. They attempted to tackle the daunting question: how do you design credit products that work for the poor, not against them?

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Suicides spark scrutiny of Indian microfinance

Gerard — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 14:52:21 GMT

A group of India's largest microfinance institutions filed a lawsuit Tuesday to block strict new regulations laid down by the state of Andhra Pradesh — a crucial market for small loans — after reports that high interest and coercive loan collection by microfinance groups had led to some 30 suicides.

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LemonWay: Exploring new ways to bank

Gerard — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 22:23:24 GMT

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Village Earth : Sustainable Village Based Development

Gerard — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 07:39:48 GMT

Village Earth's mission is to help reconnect communities to the resources that promote human well-being by enhancing social and political empowerment, community self-reliance and self-determination.

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Mobile is the future of microfinance?

Gerard — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 02:13:36 GMT

Lyon created a system to bring formal financial services to microfinance institutions and poor entrepreneurs via a mobile phone. He believes the new software, to be launched by the organization he founded, FrontlineSMS:Credit, could change the world of microfinance by changing the way the poor interact with the institutions.

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CGAP: Microfinance assets dip in 2009, slower growth ahead

Gerard — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 17:09:28 GMT

The asset growth of microfinance investment intermediaries (MIIs) fell to 21 per cent at estimated $8.2 billion in 2009 from 31 per cent growth in 2008, hurt by the global financial crisis. The growth is expected to slow down further to 15 per cent in 2010.

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Rural Finance Learning Centre

Gerard — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 08:33:45 GMT

Rural Finance is about providing financial services for people living in rural areas. This Learning Centre aims to assist organisations in developing countries to build their capacity to deliver improved financial services which meet the needs of rural households and businesses.

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Asian Microfinance Forum 2010 concludes with success

Gerard — Sat, 16 Oct 2010 09:25:41 GMT

The three-day Asian Microfinance Forum 2010 wrapped up bringing to a close three full days of conferences, panel sessions and seminars all of which were well attended by almost 500 delegates from 50 countries who were in Colombo for the event as well as many local industrialists, bankers and other interested parties.

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Leading private financial institution established in Lao PDR

Gerard — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 21:37:00 GMT

Newton Microfinance Institution is the leading private financial institution in Lao PDR. Their vision is to make sure that every Lao resident not only has access to but also benefits from the financial blessings globally enjoyed. They are installing Internet banking services to their clients in several languages including Lao, English, french, etc.

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