The Africa-Brazil Cooperation Programme on Social Development promotes technical exchanges between Brazil and African countries. Currently, twenty-six delegates from Angola, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, the African Union, NEPAD and AfDB are participating in a Study Tour in Brazil.

Grant Amount: $465,000 over three years to expand its operations in Latin America and East Africa to foster environment conservation and grassroots economic development
Award Year: 2005. SASE Awards/Skoll Foundation. William Foote was an investment banker during the Latin American growth years of the early 1990s. After the peso was devalued in 1994, he spent two years in rural Mexico studying and writing about the financial crisis and its effects on rural people and the environment. He founded more...

Commercially-driven, business-to-business partnerships in microfinance are, and will continue to be, driven primarily by the market. But should the process be left exclusively to the market? It is the view of this author that rapid scaling up of partnership approaches in microfinance is unlikely to occur without active leadership by organizations and individuals in a position to facilitate the process, based on a sound understanding of the dynamics of the partnering process. Further, a commitmen more...

When farmers get access to credit and reliable storage facilities for their grain, it gives them the option to sell it when they can get the best price. The warehouse receipt system, introduced in some districts of Tanzania through an IFAD-supported programme, is now being introduced throughout the country by the government.

Date: 4 Aug 2008

Location: UNCDF Headquarters, New York, USA

Program/Working Group:

UNCDF is an independent UN organization that works closely with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). About the Job: The LDC Fund for Developing Market Leaders for Inclusive Finance Portfolio Specialist will have accountability, through the day to day supervision by the UNCDF Deputy Director, Financial Inclusion Practice Area (FIPA) to the UNCDF Director, Financial Inclusion Practice Area.

Date: 4 Aug 2008

Location: SEEP Network

Program/Working Group:


SEEP Announces the 2008 International Practicum Internship Program in Microfinance and Microenterprise Development.
SEEP is seeking exceptional results-oriented and dynamic interns to join its team and contribute to its long-term success. Deadline for applications is August 22, 2008.

For more information, contact:

Jada
telephone: 202-464-3773

This paper focuses on smaller banks or microfinance institutions that face a much higher cost-of-service delivery because of the smaller transaction values they handle and the likely more remote and dispersed location of at least some of their customers. The opportunity seems particularly great for them, but implementation challenges also loom larger because of their small scale.

Grameen Foundation CEO Alex Counts outlines a new vision of microfinance as a platform, not a product; one that relies on high volumes, not high margins, and that uses limits on private benefit, holistic performance standards, and third-party certification.

Counts redefines the dichotomy between commercial microfinance and pro-poor microfinance to propose a new model that, he argues, could make microfinance both more relevant to the world's poor and more profitable in the long term.

He als more...

Combining international scope with consolidated and comprehensive coverage, this magazine is a resource whether you are a practitioner, investor, consultant, researcher, student or sector leader. Microfinance Insights provides new ways of thinking about the microfinance space.

The objective of the Expanding Microfinance Outreach and Improving Sustainability Project is to achieve operational sustainability for most microfinance service providers and help them scale up outreach of financial services to meet the needs and demands of many poor Afghans, especially women. This project only has one component; all the funding will be provided by Microfinance Investment Support Facility for Afghanistan (MISFA) to the microfinance service provider organizations as loan funds fo more...