Harnessing Student Potential In Microfinance

Whats going on with MF at your school?

Part of the mission of this site is to have people share ideas, successes, and failures surrounding microfinance. We really want to know and share what is going on with the microfinance club at your school.

Please feel free to share what your school is doing and any feedback that might be helpful to other schools looking to do the same thing.

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Permalink Reply by Anais Concepcion on November 30, 2009 at 7:49pm

This week the Lehigh University Microfinance Club is have it's 2nd annual Ten Thousand Villages Sale. Ten Thousand Villages ( http://www.tenthousandvillages.com/ ) is a great organization that brings products created by artisans in the developing world to our very door step, for sale! It was wildly successful fund-raiser that should be even more successful this year.
We also have a Kiva Team that was started just this year. The Kiva team is an ongoing, year-round fund-raising machine that takes smaller donations from the Lehigh Community and rolls them into larger loans for Kiva's micro-entrepreneurs. Sometime in the spring we will have a website up announcing who we've loaned and their repayment to date. We found that the best way to run a Kiva Team is by having the school create a separate account for Kiva Funds so that it never mixes with club funds. Also, people can donate through the Lehigh website directly to the Kiva Fund.
We also work with the Reach the Children and held a Dance-A-Thon in early November to raise money and awareness. International dance teams on campus were invited to perform. The music played was internationally themed and a few prizes were given away to dancers who won competitions.
This spring we'll be hosting our second annual Micro-Business Expo. Last year we hosted nearly 60 small business in the greater Bethlehem, Allentown, and Easton area to come participate in a trade-show they would otherwise not be able to afford. We had purchasing agents present to help promote the businesses further. TD Bank sponsored the event and we hope to bring them back this year as well.
We'll also be having in April a second Ten-Thousand-Village-esque sale except we won't be working through the Ten Thousand Villages. The microfinance program at Lehigh has taken students to Peru, Ghana, Honduras, and Cambodia, and we feel we have forged strong enough connections to bring merchandise onto our campus through our own relationships with MFIs and micro-entrepreneurs.

Lastly, and this is those of you here at MFI connect can REALLY participate, we'll be hosting an African Microfinance Conference on April 19th and 20th and hope to invite clubs from other universities as well as offer the conference via web conference to any university who wishes to participate. The conference will consistent of many guest speakers and panelists to field questions.
Guest Speakers include:
Marguerite Robinson, author of The Microfinance Revolution
Elizabeth Rhyne, Managing Director of the Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International
Ira Lieberman, founder of CGAP
And others...
Panelists include Renee Chao Beroff, Wagane Diouf, and Tony Singleton.

If you are interested in attending the conference in persion, or viewing it via video conference, please send me an e-mail at anc210@lehigh.edu . Some of you may be hearing from me in the months to come regardless as I reach out to fellow microfinance clubs at other universities.

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Permalink Reply by Zach Ingrasci on December 1, 2009 at 2:07pm

Wow the April 19th and 20th conference sounds really interesting! What technology are you using in order to broadcast the conference? We recently had a live conference put on by mobilize.org playing on our site. We embedded their web based player into MFI connect. You should check out the technology they used and we would be happy to broadcast it through MFI connect.

Also I am a student at Claremont McKenna College and we would be interested in virtually attending the conference as well.