Microfinance and microcredit » business

Give your signature

admin — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 09:02:43 +0000

A lot of people are living under poverty, but with microfinance they have the chance to lift themselves out of poverty. Microfinance provides financial resources like loans, savings, insurances and business training to help people build businesses.

Oktober 17th is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon is going to perform a speech that day. Wouldn´t it be good if the focus in his speech was on microfinance as the key in poverty ending? Accion international has a campaign in order to collect 5000 signatures. By giving your signature we can all help making big impact to spread the word.

Accion have released their annual report for 2007

admin — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 06:24:37 +0000

Accion is illustrating poverty fighting strategies, what they are doing now and what are planning to do later in their report for 2007. They write about the problems of the microfinance world and how to solve them.

Download the annulal report here if you are interested in microfinance and microcredit.

In times when stockmarkets are falling

admin — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 12:15:24 +0000

Almost everywhere around the world the stockmarkets have been falling in the last time, due to things like banks loosing money in subprime loans.

But not everything are loosing value nowadays. The microfinance industry is developing and more traditional financial institutions are opening their eyes for microfinance because they starts to see the huge opportunities. Investing in microfinance and helping people start busiensses means profits for both the lender and borrower. It´s a stable and secure investment since the repayment rates of the loans are on a average close to 100%!

The Asian Development Bank will fund banking services in Vanuatu

admin — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 16:18:23 +0000

Vanatau belongs to the poorest countries of the pacific areas. Many people are out of reach of modern and secure banking services in the rural areas of Vanuatu. Some people that are employed by the government must make long trips to the nearest branch of the National Bank of Vanuatu (NBV) to deposit their salary in the bank. Some farmers are even hiding their money by burying it in the ground rather than going the long way to the bank and collect their money. Only 13% of the people in the rural areas have bank account and access to financial services. It is estimated that about 92,000 people need financial services.

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) is now supporting the development of banking services that will make it able for the people to use electronic banking and smartcard technology. The new electronic banking system will provide local access to secure and convenient banking services. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) will manage $600,000 in technical assistance, provided by the Japan Special Fund. The National Bank of Vanuatu will support with $150,000 more to complete the funding.

With this new technical support they can provide i wide range of modern banking services which will satisfy the clients financial needs. If it comes out good it can be a model to develop the financial services throughout the Pacific. When everything is up and running the National Bank of Vanuatu can start with microfinance products such as microcredit for example.

Local stores and bank agents will be supplied with the technology and equipment and the clients can open saving accounts with modern facilities, this is how the business model will work.