Harnessing Student Potential In Microfinance
Kenya Follow-Up
For students planning on attending the Microcredit Summit in Nairobi, here's a question for you.
How do you plan on applying what you learn at the Summit to your local campus and community?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Lisa Kant on -
Though we in the US tend to think of Microfinance as a tool to help developing countries, Microfinance also has a place in our communities. Los Angeles, where I currently live, and Chicago, where I will be attending school for the next two years, are both home to some of the poorest neighborhoods in the US. Through the Yale Club of Los Angeles, I have put together a panel and fundraiser event on the topic of Women in Microfinance, which will be held on April 28th. A link to more information on the panel can be found here: www.yalela.org. (Anyone in the LA area reading this should definitely come!) Our sponsors & panelists include Kiva.org, Opportunity Fund, Innovations for Poverty Action, UCLA Anderson and Yale SOM. As this event will fall immediately after the Nairobi conference I plan to raise awareness at my event for the Microcredit Summit Campaign by sharing about my experiences from the conference and from visiting the local MFIs with the audience and the Los Angeles Microfinance community, hopefully with the result of getting more students to attend the Summit next year.
In addition, The University of Chicago, where I will begin classes this coming Fall, has several programs which will benefit from the knowledge, experience and contacts I can acquire at the Summit. The school recently began a yearly Microfinance Conference in conjunction with the Kellogg School of Management and the Harris School of Public Policy. I hope to bring back ideas for our conference and potential speakers who will inform the work in economics and international development research going on at the school. Chicago also has a program where we collaborate with companies in emerging markets and offer them pro-bono consulting and management services. I hope to make connections with international organizations that we can partner with once I move to Chicago this summer.
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Permalink Reply by Paloma on
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Attending the Summit is not only an invaluable opportunity for my personal and professional development but moreover is an experience that I can use to inspire others and to make the local microfinance-related institutions I am a part of more effective. There are two major approaches I will take to bringing back what I hope learn at the Summit to my local community.
The first is through strengthening the domestic MFI for which I direct Client Services, the Elmseed Enterprise Fund (www.elmseed.org). Through observing firsthand the policies and practices of MFIs in Kenya during field visits, and through discussing major trends and challenges in the field as a whole during panels and workshops, I hope to bring back fresh suggestions and a critical eye that can improve our operating model and help us to better serve our clients. Although there are clearly major differences between international and domestic microfinance needs and realities, I think that the knowledge I would gain through attending the Summit - learning how organizations are evaluating metrics, trying out new products or services, structuring their interactions with their clients, etc. - could most definitely generate ideas that would be extremely helpful to Elmseed. This would not only benefit the 20 local entrepreneurs in New Haven whom we currently serve with business training, consulting, and microloans ($2000 - $4500), but would moreover help us to improve our organizational structure, which could have a crucial impact on the future direction of student-run microfinance as a whole. As the oldest student MFI, we are currently helping many other more recently-started organizations by sharing advice and best practices, both through the Campus Microfinance Alliance and a new program started by ACCION USA called the On Campus Initiative. Thus, the suggestions and ideas that I would be able to take away from the Summit and apply to Elmseed would have a broad and significant impact.
Secondly, I will use what I learn at the Summit to educate the broader student community at Yale about microfinance and hopefully inspire them to take action or become involved in some way. As a member of the Global Development Alliance at Yale, I already have the networks and connections in place which could help me to disseminate information learned, through hosting round-tables, speakers, and events related to the themes and topics of the Summit. As a few others in the thread have touched on, I believe there is a crucial need to separate true impact and hope for the future potential of microfinance from unrealistic and unproductive sensationalism. Microfinance is not a panacea, and some of the recent skepticism is deserved, as a backlash against such assertions. Nonetheless, the impact it does and can have is incredible, as is its potential for sustainability - it is without a doubt one of the most important development tools we have and we will continue to have in the future. I plan to use my experience at the Summit to draw Yale students, professors, and alums together behind this movement, through relaying the knowledge that I am able to take away. Throughout all of these efforts, I plan to stay in close contact with the other students whom I am able to meet and share ideas with at the Summit.
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Permalink Reply by Soham Banerji on -
Being a part of the Macalester Development Group and having worked at the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota, the knowledge I garner from the Summit will help me inform, educate, invigorate and directly apply the principles of Microfinance to my community and college.
I plan on hosting informational sessions on campus related to my experiences at the Summit and organize subgroups to help the immigrant community in the Twin Cities area.
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Permalink Reply by Romina Kazandjian on -
The knowledge and skills that I will undoubtedly gain by attending the Microcredit Summit in Nairobi will be invaluable for the establishment and further development of a Microfinance Initiative at Adelphi University.
As a follow-up to the Summit, I plan on organizing an event to raise awareness about the benefits of microfinance among the student body, the school administration and the greater community of Garden City, NY. The event will also serve as a fundraising activity for our peer-to-peer online lending initiative. I intend to use the school newspaper as a venue to further educate the student population by sharing with them the success stories that I will encounter during the field visits in Nairobi. I hope to learn from the experience of fellow delegates, MFI representatives, as well as entrepreneurs about concrete and effective initiatives that a student-run organization can pursue besides engaging in peer-to-peer lending.
Another idea that I have involves advocating in favor of microfinance before the school administration in an effort to convince them to diversify their portfolio by lending to small-scale businesses and entrepreneurs in developing countries. Thus, having attended the Summit will give me more leverage in engaging in such negotiations.
Raising awareness about MFIs among the greater community of Garden City, which is a rather privileged area, is another goal of mine. I plan to partner with local charitable organizations not only to solicit donations, but more importantly, to educate the population and change the mainstream perceptions that they may have about investing in small and medium businesses in developing countries.
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Permalink Reply by Pia Gugnani on -
Attending The Microcredit Summit in Nairobi will be an invaluable experience for me. I hope to supplement my knowledge with on-the-ground realities and disseminate the acquired information in an effective manner. I hope to reach out to my campus and community using the following approaches-
1. I hope to organize a mini Microcredit Summit at Yale, involving some of our own faculty and visiting faculty along with a motivated community of students. I believe that this conference has immense potential because it brings together present and future leaders in the field of microfinance. Recreating this stimulating environment at Yale will greatly benefit the student body. I hope to bring together professors from Yale College, Yale School of Management and Yale School of Public Health along with visiting faculty from MIT. I would also invite the various student groups on campus such as Elmseed, the Microfinance Task Force, Care, See Your Impact and Global Development Alliance to get together and share ideas and learn from the experience of others.
2. I believe that the lessons from this conference hold direct relevance to the problems faced by an emerging economy such as India. I hope to work in India after graduation and would ensure that these lessons are effectively disseminated internationally.
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Permalink Reply by Sasha Noelle Anderson on -
I plan to apply my experience at the Africa/Middle East Regional Microcredit Summit 2010 to three areas: my on-campus organizing at Chapman University, my work for Campus Kiva, and my professional development.
For my campus, I plan on thoroughly taking pictures and writing each night during the conference, in order to document the experience and information. I would like to post this on our university website in order to share the conference with those at my university who were not able to attend, and who are either thinking of getting involved in microfinance and want to know more about it, or are already involved and want to know more about what is going on in the greater microfinance community. Secondly, I plan to take the information learned and apply it to our fundraising initiatives. Our Campus Kiva chapter is looking for ways to deepen our relationship with SIFE (Students In Free Enterprise) in order to support international microcredit efforts. The conference will hopefully suggest some things we can do with such a partnership to raise funds and awareness. Related to this goal, I plan to gather information about the current scope of microfinance in order to update and enrich the literature that my club distributes. In addition, I intend to put together a list of ways for fellow club members to continue to be involved with microfinance after they leave Chapman, as many of them are graduating. I think the conference will connect me with many organizations that our club is not familiar with, giving me lots of opportunities to relate back to Chapman students. Also, I will be writing an article about the experience to put in several campus news sources in order to publicize the important work that our student group is contributing to, and to encourage wider campus participation and support.
For Campus Kiva, in my capacity as Coordinator of International Expansion, I am looking to meet students or people who have contact with students from both the United States and elsewhere in order to encourage them to create Campus Kiva chapters, or any other type of student club related to microfinance. After the conference, I plan to follow-up with students to help them start such initiatives. I also plan to post several entries about what I learn and see at the conference to the discussion section of the Campus Kiva website (www.campuskiva.org), in order to reach those beyond my university.
For myself, I hope to apply the information given in the presentations and workshops to my Master’s and future career, which in turn will benefit the communities I work with. I am currently studying women’s empowerment through entrepreneurship and learning French and Arabic in order to work in North Africa. I hope to connect with microfinance groups that I had not previously known about in this region in order to build my microfinance network contacts for the future. Next year, I will be living and going to school in India, where I hope to find a way to volunteer with a microcredit organization. Potentially this conference will connect me with groups in India who need volunteers.
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Permalink Reply by Davis Winslow on -
As a junior currently taking a microfinance class at my university, I am in a unique position to encourage discussion about microfinance and "stirring the pot" on campus. My school, Seattle Pacific University, is in a really cool stage in that there is a lot of hype and focus on global issues of poverty and underdevelopment. The school has created a new Global Development Studies major, was one of the first to implement a class on microfinance, and has tried to create a culture that seeks to address issues of global poverty. I'm really proud of the direction the school and the surrounding community is going, and if I am able to attend this Summit I feel I will be in a great position to further the awareness of my community of microfinance and its role in alleviating poverty.
After attending the Summit I would seek to pursue an active role in furthering awareness of microfinance on my campus. I am always looking for ways to get more involved, and my current role as a part of a social media team connecting the SPU community to events and discussions concerned with issues pertaining to global development would help as I try to set up events to raise awareness about microfinance. I would definitely plan to set up some kind of meeting to talk about my trip and what I learned, and based on the interest shown, pursue starting a more formal group focused on microfinance.
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Permalink Reply by Sasha Noelle Anderson on
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Hey Lisa,
I saw the post about the Women in Microfinance event in LA. My school (Chapman University) is in Orange County, and some of our Campus Kiva chapter members might like to organize a field trip to attend. I checked your link but didn't see any info about it. Could you email me at ander163@mail.chapman.edu with the details? Thanks!
-Sasha
Lisa Kant said:Though we in the US tend to think of Microfinance as a tool to help developing countries, Microfinance also has a place in our communities. Los Angeles, where I currently live, and Chicago, where I will be attending school for the next two years, are both home to some of the poorest neighborhoods in the US. Through the Yale Club of Los Angeles, I have put together a panel and fundraiser event on the topic of Women in Microfinance, which will be held on April 28th. A link to more information on the panel can be found here: www.yalela.org. (Anyone in the LA area reading this should definitely come!) Our sponsors & panelists include Kiva.org, Opportunity Fund, Innovations for Poverty Action, UCLA Anderson and Yale SOM. As this event will fall immediately after the Nairobi conference I plan to raise awareness at my event for the Microcredit Summit Campaign by sharing about my experiences from the conference and from visiting the local MFIs with the audience and the Los Angeles Microfinance community, hopefully with the result of getting more students to attend the Summit next year.
In addition, The University of Chicago, where I will begin classes this coming Fall, has several programs which will benefit from the knowledge, experience and contacts I can acquire at the Summit. The school recently began a yearly Microfinance Conference in conjunction with the Kellogg School of Management and the Harris School of Public Policy. I hope to bring back ideas for our conference and potential speakers who will inform the work in economics and international development research going on at the school. Chicago also has a program where we collaborate with companies in emerging markets and offer them pro-bono consulting and management services. I hope to make connections with international organizations that we can partner with once I move to Chicago this summer.
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Permalink Reply by Zarif Islam on
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Knowledge is power. That is definitely a cliché, but then again, clichés exist and persevere for a reason. The main reason I plan to attend the summit is to gain knowledge and vicariously benefit from others’ experiences with microfinance schemes. I hope to come back with an increased understanding and appreciation for the most effective methods of implementing such schemes under differing contexts.
Right now I am involved with a small, newly-established NGO in Ghana that is planning to provide microfinance in some poorer urban communities in the Greater Accra region. The knowledge and skills that I gain will allow me to critically assess the program that is in place and make the changes necessary to make it successful.
I can also use the knowledge in order to come up with an effective microfinance program in NJ, the state in where I am currently studying. Microfinance, in my opinion, has not been properly utilized in developed countries as a means of helping poorer urban dwellers in finding a way to support themselves. At this point in time, I am not sure about what kind of a microfinance scheme would work in this context but am hoping that attending the conference will shed some light on the matter.
Lastly, I pan to come back and raise interest on my campus and other University campus’s in the area (including Princeton, TCNJ and Rutgers) about microfinance and its role in development.
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Permalink Reply by Elvira Omondi on
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I will share the ideas with members of Microfinance group in college and we will develop modules on how this could be applied in different scenarios/communities we being the front runners.
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Permalink Reply by Xinquan (Paul) Gu on
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As staff on the Client Services department, staff on the Finance department and Webmaster of Yale's Elmseed Enterprise Fund, I have been able to see the challenges of our local organization through a multitude of perspectives. The first level of a successful MFI operation is client recruitment. Further levels include how to evaluate the reliability of clients, how to encourage and assist clients, how to structure loans, how to manage loan collection, and how to graduate clients from the program, among many other issues. Learning from the conference the experiences of MFIs on the ground in developing countries as well as the best practices of other student microfinance institutions across the world will make invaluable contributions to my understanding of best practices in these areas. Specifically, I have recently been working with the finance department and professional bankers to evaluate the efficacy of our loan structure. Issues include the length of loans, the size of loans, and the policies for dealing with clients who are not repaying. This is a seemingly technical issue that has huge ramifications for the effectiveness of a MFI's operations and one of many issues in which I hope to gain significant insight through the Summit.
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Permalink Reply by Sophia Dawkins on
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I am fortunate to be part of a group of student volunteers who support a micro-savings initiative that I helped launch. This initiative works through the Kibera School of Hope in the Kibera slum of Nairobi to integrate community savings groups for school fees, a nutrition program and income generation activities with management of the school. The savings groups provide financial education and access to credit as a starting point for families to achieve their aspirations.
The Summit would enrich a broad body of students’ understanding of successful microfinance programming, allowing us to tap new innovations. After attendance, I would share the knowledge I acquire with my fellow student volunteers so that we can translate the fruits of the Summit to better programming. In addition, this transfer of ideas would enable our volunteer group to strengthen the quality of debate about microfinance at multiple forums within our community. In this respect, the Summit opens unique programmatic and academic opportunities for students on campus.
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