Events

April 7, 2011

After Hours Seminar #50 will feature Khalid Al-Naif and Raul Reynoso from the William Davidson Institute (WDI) at the University of Michigan who will discuss the impacts and challenges of their study pilot activity, on "Mobilizing Remittances for Enterprise Finance." Saul Wolf from of World Council of Credit Unions (WOCCU) will follow with a presentation on "Guatemala Unbanked Remittances." and discuss current strategic alliances and ongoing challenges in creating increased opportunities for remittance recipients.

August 30, 2010
USAID

Timothy Nourse, Chief of Party of the Expanded and Sustained Access to Financial Services (ESAF) program will be presenting on microfinance in West Bank and Gaza.

March 9, 2011

Join Peter Ippolito and Andrés Rico Toro from TechnoServe for the USAID Microenterprise Development office After Hours Seminar, "Effectively Catalyzing SME Growth through Business Plan Competitions: Innovative Examples from Latin America." The speakers will focus in particular on how regional efforts from El Salvador to Chile have allowed TechnoServe to continuously improve its capacity to encourage entrepreneurship and high impact SMEs.

If you have any questions about the webinar, please email us.

 

 

May 4, 2011
USAID

Investors, regulators and even clients all want to support microfinance institutions that demonstrate strong social performance. And practitioners want to be recognized for the good work that they do. But many questions arise. Can a certification provide real confidence about the caliber of an MFI's social performance? What are the prerequisites to successful certification? Are they in place in the microfinance sector? If not, will all the stakeholders embrace them fully?

October 13, 2011

Currently, the United Nations estimates that there are more than 200 million migrants worldwide. According to the World Bank, migrants sent more than $325 billion in remittances to their families and friends in 2010. Because the vast majority of these remittances were sent through informal channels, the full economic impact of this substantial sum of money was never realized.

February 16, 2012

Financial access can be critical to reducing hunger and poverty in three ways. First, financial access for agricultural value chain development is needed throughout the value chain to achieve broad-based economic growth for low-income households. Second, diversification out of agriculture is a hallmark of economic growth, but rural entrepreneurs require financial access in order to invest in non-farm enterprises.

March 21, 2012

Negotiating your way out of poverty is like a life-long or even intergenerational challenge, where any small movement out of poverty can be undone by an illness in the family or a natural disaster. Many of the tools of pro-poor economic growth are meant to help prevent a family from going down, soften the blow from setbacks or even provide ways out of poverty.

Ultra-poor households, however, are usually incapable of even meeting life’s basic necessities – they lack productive assets of any kind and are too vulnerable to gainfully participate in markets.

July 20, 2011
USAID

A recent CGAP Focus Note stated, “The problems of over-lending and the associated risk of over-indebtedness in some of the fastest growing markets—Bosnia-Herzegovina, Nicaragua, and, most recently, India—have seriously tarnished the industry’s image and have led to a re-evaluation of some of the fundamental practices of microfinance.”  Now more than ever transparency and objective evaluation is needed for the sector to rise above the criticism and offer investors and other stakeholders a realistic perspective on the risk and returns related to microfinance investment.

August 25, 2011

In the upcoming After Hours Seminar #54 Fermin Vivanco, Natasha Bajuk and Maria Luisa Hayem from the Inter-American Development Bank will discuss an innovative and multi-donor approach that the Multilateral Investment Fund is taking when linking savings to government payments, including conditional cash transfers, in Latin America and the Caribbean. This approach emphasizes the role of financial intermediaries for a more effective developmental impact.

September 1, 2011

Half of the world's 6 billion people are below the age of 25. Eighty-five per cent of these young people live in the developing world and face limited opportunities for education, asset building and employment.