You Can Support Mobile Microfranchising in Indonesia with Your Vote

Susana Escudero is an intern for Grameen Foundation, based in our Washington, DC, office.

Grameen Foundation has been selected as a semi-finalist for the Ashoka Changemakers Powering Economic Opportunity: Create a World that Works competition, for our initiative to provide mobile phone-based services and business opportunities for the poorest in Indonesia. We were selected as one of 15 semi-finalists from 873 innovations in 83 countries around the world!

The 10 projects that receive the most votes from July 20 through August 10 will proceed to the final judging round, where five organizations will be chosen to each receive a $50,000 grant to further their work. Your vote today will help us become one of those finalists, enabling us to help improve the life of Halimah and more women like her in Indonesia.

Halimah, who lives on the island of West Java, owns and operates a small shop with her husband. Though he tries to find day labor whenever possible to help supplement their income, his work is not steady, so their income is not consistent. Like most of us, Halimah’s dream is to provide a better life for her children, aged 9, 13 and 15. Despite all her hard work, for many years her family’s combined income averaged only $1.80/day.

But that was before Grameen Foundation offered her new income-generating opportunities. For the last four years, we have worked with our collaborators – Qualcomm Wireless Reach, PT Ruma, and Bakrie Telecom – to help people like Halimah to lift themselves out of poverty.  Through our Village Phone initiative and AppLab program, we offer poor entrepreneurs profitable mobile phone-related business opportunities that can help improve their lives.

When Halimah was approached by a Ruma field officer about starting a new line of business selling airtime, she was excited about the possibilities and agreed to do it, because of the existing demand and the potential of a steady cash flow for her shop. Today, Halimah is able to provide an additional income of $1.10/day for her family through her mobile phone business.

Ibu Halimah has been able to increase the income from her small store -- and provide a better life for her children -- by selling airtime for mobile phones to others in her village.

AppLab Indonesia provides the working poor with an innovative and sustainable way of meeting growing demand for affordable access to information through a microfranchising model that is easy for them to use and benefit from. To find out more about the initiative, watch a video about the project on the Grameen Foundation website.

You can be part of the team working to help poor women like Halimah – with the click of a mouse! Please visit the Changemakers competition website to learn more about our innovative project and vote for our Mobile Microfranchising in Indonesia initiative, and ask your friends and family to do the same.

You can vote once during the three-week period for each email address you use (so, for example, if you have a personal email address and a work email address, you can vote once from each account). The Changemakers site will ask you to either create a username and password linked to your email address, or log in through your Facebook account. With enough votes – and a $50,000 grant – we can continue expanding our efforts to create opportunities for women like Halimah.

Experiencing Microfinance in Ghana, Part II

Kim Kerry-Tyerman is a volunteer for Grameen Foundation’s Bankers without Borders® initiative, based in Ghana and Kenya for eight weeks to help the BwB team develop relationships with local organizations (companies, associations, microfinance clubs and institutions of higher education) there. She recently posted a blog about her experience working with another BwB volunteer on behalf of Grameen Ghana, helping to implement a financial-modeling approach by Grameen Foundation that we hope to replicate at microfinance institutions (MFIs) throughout the world; an excerpt from that post is below, with a link to the full post.  If you’d like to read her first posting about her BwB experience in Ghana, you can find it here.

I’ve been counting down the days to this.  Not that thunderstorms, tigernut cocktails and weekend stays at oceanside eco lodges haven’t kept me busy – my stay in Ghana has been a fascinating combination of experiences both new (opening a coconut with a machete) and surprisingly normal (watching too many episodes of “The New Adventures of Old Christine” while dogsitting for a friend).  But I’m not here just to drive around with locals to chop bars with dancehall music blaring out the open windows to join in the cacophony of Accra streets.  Certainly part of the fun, but not the goal.

I’ve been talking up the Bankers without Borders program to MFIs across Accra, and this is finally my chance to watch it in action.  Grameen Foundation asked me to shadow a BwB project for a partner MFI called Grameen Ghana in the northern city of Tamale (surprisingly no affiliation despite the shared namesake).  A volunteer from an investment bank in NYC, Noah, is delivering training on a new financial model over a 4-day assignment.  This is only the second time this Grameen Foundation model has been passed on to another MFI, but BwB hopes this will eventually lead to a standard for financial projections across the industry.

On the road to Tamale, Ghana.

My role on the project varies depending on who you talk to.  BwB would like me to evaluate the project from both volunteer and client perspectives with an objective third eye.  Not having a chance to introduce myself during the kick-off meeting with the MFI, however, gave the director the opportunity to task me with a different role.  “And Noah has brought this pretty woman,” he announced to the team, “so everything we do will be prettier.”  Challenge accepted.

Read the rest of Kim’s blog post >>

Examining the Potential of Microfinance through a Haitian MFI

Alex Counts is president, CEO and founder of Grameen Foundation, and author of several books, including Small Loans, Big Dreams: How Nobel Prize Winner Muhammad Yunus and Microfinance are Changing the World.

Grameen Foundation has been working for 14 years to advance a certain approach to microfinance – one that is rooted in the experiences, achievements and philosophy of Grameen Bank.  Though we do not promote any particular methodology (i.e., a certain means of providing financial or human development services to the poor), we do focus on and try to advance a set of principles and standards.  Methodologies are very context-specific, while principles endure and standards are universal.  (We approach our technology-for-development work similarly, but that is beyond the scope of this short post.)

Some of the principles are not particularly controversial or microfinance-specific – things like a commitment to transparency, innovation, being client-centered, investing in the human capital of employees, promoting gender equality and so on.  Others are specific to microfinance, such as bundling financial and human development services wherever possible, measuring and managing social performance on par with financial performance, mobilizing loan capital locally (through savings or local currency borrowings), and local (or indigenous) ownership and governance.  Among the latter, there are some thoughtful people in our movement (or industry, as some prefer to call it) who would disagree with the wisdom of these principles. I say that to emphasize that these are not meaningless slogans that everyone agrees on.

Talking about principles and standards, and about our work to champion innovation that spreads them throughout the microfinance sector, can seem abstract at times, even though we are clearer than ever that this is how Grameen Foundation can have the greatest impact.  Sometimes we find it helpful to focus on individual organizations that embody these principles and meet these standards, however imperfectly, to deepen our own understanding of how microfinance can evolve, and also further the understanding of people who support our organization in various ways.  With microfinance coming under increasing scrutiny by regulators, the media and politicians, holding up pace-setting institutions is an important part of educating stakeholders about what microfinance can be, and arguably should be.

During his recent trip to Haiti, Alex met extensively with the borrowers and staff of Fonkoze, including founder Father Joseph Philippe (left).

With my second sabbatical approaching (at Grameen Foundation we get one every seven years), I decided to pick one such organization and write a book about it for a general audience.  It was not that hard to decide which one – I chose Fonkoze, Haiti’s largest MFI.  It is a dynamic, innovative, risk-taking organization led by fascinating people – mostly Haitians and Haitian-Americans, but also a few Americans and Europeans – in a country that has been in the news in recently (for all the wrong reasons, unfortunately).  It has also been a beneficiary of Grameen Foundation’s products and services for more than a decade.

I began my sabbatical on June 16 and a few days later was down in Haiti – my fifth and longest trip yet to that sad and surprising country.  Shortly before going, I began a blog that would chronicle the process of researching and writing the book, and invited people around the world to participate in the creative process.  I have been posting short written reflections, photos and videos (most under two minutes) ever since.

My goals for this project are aggressive. I want it to be a New York Times best-seller!  (Why the heck not?)  I also want it to generate significant new partners and funders for Grameen Foundation, Fonkoze and organizations that operate along similar lines.  (All the royalties from the book will go to Grameen Foundation.)  And I want it to change the narrative in the mainstream media from simplistic answers to the “what’s wrong with microfinance” question to more interesting analyses of how it is evolving in some places to be an even more potent poverty-fighting strategy than earlier models.  I plan to have the book in stores by the third anniversary of the Haiti earthquake (January 12, 2013).

Ambitious?  Yes!  But with new “friends” of this project coming forward every day – consider yourself invited! – it just might be achievable.