Attendees at today’s program on remittances learned about innovations in the field from representatives of Caixa Economica Verde, Mukuru and Swift as well as the FairRemit service, whose collaborators include Aktif Bank’s UPT money transfer service and the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute.
Swift has a new product – Swift Go – for low-value transactions, whose features include upfront visibility on cost. Among the selling points of FairRemit is that its transfers are
From the European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP): Fonkoze has won the €100,000 prize awarded by the Directorate for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs of the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs.
Three financial service providers from the South were in the running
Mariama Kamara of Smiling Through Light, a women-run provider of solar products in rural Sierra Leone, stayed in business during the COVID-19 pandemic thanks to emergency funding from the Shine Campaign. Demand is high for Smiling Through Light’s products, but the last shipment of solar appliances from the manufacturer took five months to arrive, causing a delay in paying staff. Only since the onset of the pandemic – and at the request of customers
During today’s case study presentation on Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH), Loise Mwangi of Kenya’s Sidian Bank shared her institution’s success in providing pandemic-relief loans for WASH equipment. Sidian lent about half of the funds, which total the equivalent of USD 4.7 million, to small and medium-sized WASH re-sellers, and the other half to
Today, at the first plenary of European Microfinance Week 2021, climate adaptation was the hot topic – in contrast to climate mitigation, which is more of a preventative measure. The panelists argued that the scale of funding for climate adaptation is much too small and that many of those most in need still lack access to funding. These groups include smallholder farmers, women, youth and members of indigenous groups. Meanwhile, financial services providers (FSPs) are reporting that
As part of the first day of European Microfinance Week 2021, Daniela Konietzko of Fundación WWB Colombia today discussed the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, the brunt of which have fallen on women. There has been more domestic violence, neighbors have quarreled more over land disputes, and pregnant women and children have suffered the worst increases in malnutrition. Meanwhile children have missed school, and women have taken on greater unpaid caregiving responsibilities.
As COVID-19 threatens to undo the gains made against poverty in recent years, Ms Konietzko argued that we need to address development with a gender lens for many reasons. Women invest triple
MicroCapital: European Microfinance Week (EMW) 2021 – like in 2020 – will be virtual. How is it possible to make an online conference a success?
Christoph Pausch: Like last year’s successful first virtual conference and in the years before it, EMW2021 remains primarily a member-led event, and the programme is developed based on what members propose and consider important. This is as true as ever. There are things we learned from last year’s event, and there will be some changes based on what we observed – and based on feedback from attendees, of course. But fundamentally the idea remains the same: a programme covering a wide range of topic streams and presented via a whole array of different session models, chosen depending on the subject matter, the audience and the objectives of the session. That means plenaries, traditional panels, workshops, topic lounges, publication launches and Action Group meetings – among others. As much as possible, we help our members put together sessions that are current, relevant, important and interactive. Beyond this, there are
Human 
resources (HR) is a critical success factor for financial institutions to become – and remain – competitive in a changing and increasingly complex business environment. Although most institutions would agree that HR functions – recruitment, onboarding, performance management, training and development, among others – are important, some questions remain: How can HR functions be carried out in a strategic and sustainable way? Are MFIs in a strong position to develop and retain the workforce they need to pursue their business and social objectives? How can they strengthen their capacity in these areas?
The lack of recent global data on MFIs’ HR management practices has made it difficult to answer these questions. To address this, the European Microfinance Platform’s (e-MFP’s) HR Action Group has conducted a large-scale
From the European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP): On the 22nd and 23rd September 2021, the Selection Committee for the European Microfinance Award 2021 (EMA 2021) on “Inclusive Finance & Health Care” chose the three finalists who will go on to compete for the EUR 100,000 (USD 117,000) prize: CRECER IFD from Bolivia, Dreamlopments Limited from Thailand and Fonkoze from Haiti.
Access to quality health care underpins everything else: it allows education to play its role in opening new opportunities; it allows people to earn, invest and employ others; it lets groups and societies prosper. But paying for health care is the single biggest
Despite the pandemic, the European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP) once again presents one of its flagship activities, European Microfinance Week (EMW), online this November. While the detailed agenda has not yet been released, it will include the presentation of the EUR 100,000 European Microfinance Award, as always. Over three days, last year’s EMW included 130 speakers reaching 500 attendees via the internet. Registrations fees vary from EUR 40 to EUR 200. More details appear at https://registration.european-microfinance-week.eu/website/27793/.
This notice is part of a sponsored series on EMW, the next iteration of which will occur online from November 17 through November 19, 2021. This event is held annually by e-MFP, a Luxembourg-based network with approximately 130 members. MicroCapital has been engaged to cover the event each year since 2012.
Additional Resources
European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP) information on European Microfinance Week 2020
http://www.e-mfp.eu/european-microfinance-week-2020
MicroCapital coverage since 2012 of European Microfinance Week, including each European Microfinance Award
https://www.microcapital.org/category/european-microfinance-week/
In
2018, e-MFP launched the first Financial Inclusion Compass, a new annual publication series to collate sector opinions on emerging short-, medium- and long-term trends in the financial inclusion sector. e-MFP is delighted to now publish the English language version of the Financial Inclusion Compass 2021 – the fourth in the series.
The survey on which this paper is based was open in May 2021, with financial services providers (FSPs), investors, donors, researchers and support services providers evaluating and describing the importance of various current Trends, rating future New Areas of Focus, and providing open-comment qualitative input on the expected (and hoped-for) direction of financial inclusion progress.
The survey had two main sections: in Section 1, respondents rated from 1-10 the current importance of a list of 20 Trends and evaluated a list of 16 future New Areas of Focus to rank their highest five in terms of future significance. Optional comments on each were possible. Section 2 had three optional and open-ended questions, with a focus on the impact of the pandemic.
The Compass received 125 responses from 39 countries. A plurality of respondents were FSPs, followed by consultants/support services providers, infrastructure organisations, funders and researchers. On the main geographic focus of respondents’ work, a plurality selected Global, followed by Sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Trends
Two new trends, introduced in response to the uniquely challenging context of the pandemic, took the top two spots
From the European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP): The past 15 months have been very challenging, and during this time we at e-MFP have engaged with our members and friends and adapted our activities accordingly to best mitigate the effects this pandemic brings to our sector and the vulnerable people we as a community serve.
One of our flagship activities is European Microfinance Week – held annually in November – and while it is difficult to predict the progression of the pandemic, it remains likely that travel restrictions will still apply in the coming months and that participants from the global South will be
MicroCapital: Why was “Inclusive Finance and Health Care” chosen as the topic of the European Microfinance Award 2021?
Christoph Pausch: As the past year has shown us all with such unfortunate clarity, health is everything. Being healthy allows education to play its role in opening new opportunities; it allows people to earn, invest and employ others; it keeps the economy growing and lets groups and societies prosper. And the opposite is true as well: without health – without health care to help people recover from serious health shocks and to stop minor health issues from becoming serious – it’s so hard for people to prosper.
This is especially true for the global poor – the financially excluded – who typically have volatile and precarious incomes and live in countries without high-quality universal health care. They not only need access to health care, but also the ability to pay for it. Too often this can mean taking on debt and selling income-generating assets or even
From the European Microfinance Platform (e-MFP): The €100,000 European Microfinance Award 2021 on ‘Inclusive Finance and Health Care’ highlights the crucial role the inclusive finance sector can play in helping low-income and excluded populations both plan day-to-day medical spending and ‘smooth’ out health-related financial shocks.
If you are
Claudio 
Gonzalez-Vega, a board member of Spain’s BBVA Microfinance Foundation, spoke of the huge impact of the COVID-19 pandemic at the closing plenary of European Microfinance Week, with life expectancy falling and an estimated 115 million people being pushed into extreme poverty. Despite the difficulties for microfinance institutions (MFIs), he said they may soon find a larger, very appropriate market for their services, given that many of these newly poor people have business experience. Dr Gonzalez-Vega argued that the “pandemic will make microfinance more important,” as – given MFIs’ “intimate knowledge of clients – the role of microfinance will be appreciated in a new light.”
Dina Pons of Belgium’s Incofin Investment Management agreed that microfinance clients have gotten
(This is the companion feature to an earlier piece on a European Microfinance Week conversation on serving refugees.)
Swati Mehta Dhawan of Germany’s Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt argued for building up legal frameworks to allow forcibly displaced persons (FDPs) to escape “infinite limbo” by accessing documentation for identification purposes, working legally and integrating with host populations. She offered the example of a person displaced to Kenya, who has been there for 15 years without being allowed to work. Hans-Martin Zademach, also of Catholic University, noted many are “stuck in survival mode,” more in need of a reliable income source than methods for managing money.
However, Ms Dhawan explained that FDPs’ needs for financial services often increase as years go by. A common trajectory is
During the plenary titled “Creating an Environment for Effective and Inclusive Savings” on day two of European Microfinance Week, Stuart Rutherford of the Hrishipara Daily Diaries Project suggested thinking of savings as two separate services – collection and storage. While storage is primary for a person with regular paychecks deposited into a bank electronically, collection is critical for cash earners. This is why the service of a susu worker, who collects deposits frequently door-to-door and then returns “withdrawals” periodically, is so valuable that people are willing to pay fees for it.
Luis Treviño Garza of the Alliance for Financial Inclusion noted that savings is an “important factor for resilience, especially for vulnerable groups.” He added that “from the regulator’s perspective savings is really crucial… above credit.”
Mr Rutherford said that “all the diaries I’ve [collected in Bangladesh] show that poor people have a strong propensity to
Ciprian Panturu of Belgium-based cooperative PHB Development opened a European Microfinance Week session on financial services providers (FSPs) moving toward digital services with a joke: “Who got the FSP to ‘go digital,’ the CEO, the CFO?” The answer, of course, is “COVID!”. Unlike before the pandemic, when FSPs were looking into digital services and clients were often unconvinced, Mr Panturu said, “Now there is a clear pull from the customer side.”
Jessica Schicks of the Belgian Investment Company for Developing Countries (BIO) agreed, “Client uptake has been a challenge in past. COVID is helping overcome digital literacy and trust issues.” However, she warned,