e-MFP, 30 September 2024
Consider this remarkable chart. It’s a rare testament of human progress, showing a 10x decline in traffic deaths alongside a 10x increase in driving – one could be forgiven for thinking that the more people drive, the fewer traffic deaths they’re likely to cause! Of course, nothing can be further from the truth. Behind this chart lies 100 years of evolution in traffic safety.
In 1900, you could drive a car the way you drive a bicycle today – assuming you could afford one, you got in and drove, using roads built for pedestrians and carriages. Road signs, speed limits, traffic signals – all arose during the next several decades. In UK, a system for testing and licensing drivers was put in place only in 1935. Safety devices followed later still, with seatbelts becoming common (and eventually mandatory) only in the 1960s, and airbags only towards the end of the century. In short, it was a century of continuous evolution.
There is an interesting pattern in this very brief history – the initial decades dealt mostly with prevention, with the goal of reducing traffic accidents themselves. Mitigation efforts like seatbelts and airbags – which explicitly accept that accidents will happen and focus on making them less deadly – these took decades longer. Perhaps this is the natural course of things: mitigation requires the years of experience and humility to accept that not everything is preventable.
When it comes to overindebtedness, this is where our sector’s client protection practices are today – stuck in the era of prevention, with not even the bare minimum when it comes to mitigation. As credit continues to expand, the inadequacies of the current system will become ever starker, with the entire system of client protection losing credibility in the process. And the only way to preserve and rebuild that credibility is to develop serious and effective measures to mitigate overindebtedness.
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FinDev Gateway, 13 March 2024
Back in 2019, the music mega-star Taylor Swift learned that the master recordings of her first six albums had been sold for $300m to an investor whom Swift regarded as an “incessant, manipulative bully” that put his own interests ahead of the artist whose work he now owned. This was a classic case of an irresponsible exit. The seller – Swift’s old manager, who had played an important part in building up her stardom during the first decade of her career – chose to maximize returns, paying no heed to whether the buyer was a reasonable fit.
Now, imagine a similar scenario in the financial inclusion sector:
Consider an NGO that spent decades incubating a strong social mission in a financial institution serving poor clients, ending its involvement by selling all of its shares to an investor focused entirely on maximizing profits. Following the purchase, the buyer steers the institution away from its poorest clients, refocusing entirely on profits and dispensing with the niceties of impact measurement or even basic client protection.
That’s an extract from the recent joint publication by CERISE+SPTF and e-MFP which I co-authored, Rethinking Responsible Equity Exits. And it happens to be particularly appropriate to Cambodia.
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next billion, 10 May 2017
There is nothing so convenient as arguing against a straw man. You dress it up in whatever way you want, then tear it down, feeling great about the accomplishment.
That’s what Milford Bateman does in his recent NextBillion article, “Don’t Fear the Rate Cap: Why Cambodia’s Microcredit Regulations Aren’t Such a Bad Thing.” He starts with the rather startling – and entirely unsupported – assertion that the rate cap announced in Cambodia is an effort to “to avert an otherwise inevitable and destructive meltdown.” He then proceeds to raise an entire army of strawmen in the form of arguments I apparently made in my article in the Phnom Penh Post, none of which are there.
Did I “steer blame away from those responsible for the current crisis in Cambodia”? Where did I write that “the supply of microcredit will completely dry up as a result of government intervention”? Did I write “if the microcredit sector is constrained in some way or its growth halted, the poor will flock to the local money-lender to satisfy their huge thirst for microcredit”?
It may work in today’s political environment, but for a credentialed academic, such license with truth and facts is simply not acceptable. The trouble is that this approach pervades the entire article.
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e-MFP, 20 October 2016
This week marks Financial Inclusion Week. In support of this effort to highlight what Financial Inclusion means for the Platform, e-MFP would like to highlight the work being done in Cambodia by its members and partners, including ADA, BIO, FMO, Incofin, and Proparco, as well as by the MIMOSA Project.
From its beginnings as a hotbed of NGO activity to one of the world’s most active microfinance markets today, Cambodia has always traced its own path in the sector. A decade ago, access to finance in Cambodia was minimal. Today, the Cambodia Microfinance Association counts 2 million loans outstanding for a population of 15 million, along with a growing number of deposit accounts, remittances, and other financial products. The Symbiotics MIV 2016 survey reports Cambodia receiving nearly 10% of microfinance investments in the world, second only to India – a country whose population is nearly 100 times larger.
What happens in Cambodia affects across the entire microfinance sector. And on that front, Cambodia is once again tracing its own path. more →
MIMOSA, 20 January 2016
Since publishing the first MIMOSA report – on Cambodia – I’ve heard one persistent critique. We say that the market is saturated, yet none of the current indicators appear to support it: repayments are great, there’s no field evidence of widespread overindebtedness, and the major MFIs are all undergoing a process of Smart Certification. How can we assert that Cambodia is at risk of overindebtedness, let alone a credit crisis, when no other indicators seem to support it?
These are important and reasonable questions. But here’s the rub – all the factors that point to a healthy market are either lagging indicators or are too vague or too poorly understood to be used as benchmarks. more →
e-MFP, 23 March 2015
The microfinance sector has many actors with many different objectives, but if there is one common element that all agree on, it’s that microfinance should not harm the clients. And one of the most important elements of client protection is responsible collections.
To operate as viable enterprises, MFIs must collect on their loans. Inevitably, some clients prove unable to repay. Some cases seem easy – a client has suffered an unexpected tragedy, so an MFI will work to understand her situation and make alternative arrangements to repay the debts, be it a grace period, rescheduling, or even extension of a supplemental loan. But what to do with those cases where a client has simply borrowed too much? What if she did it for a “bad” reason – say, to buy a television? What if a borrower lied by denying that she had other debts? Unfortunately, such situations do happen.
In such cases recovery is still the goal. But one cannot recover money that’s not there. Responsible MFIs don’t press their clients to sell key income-generating assets that they depend on for survival. The key is to find the middle path – maintain pressure to repay, but not so high that the client is pushed into destitution.
So what about Greece? Does the experience of microfinance have any useful lessons for the Greek government and its creditors? more →
e-MFP, 12 February 2015
The verdict is out. Final publication of six randomly-controlled studies (RCTs) has drawn a pretty thick line under the words of David Roodman: the average impact of microcredit on poverty is about zero. The notion that microfinance lifts the poor out of poverty is officially dead.
Now, the caveats. The studies evaluated microcredit only – not savings or payments or insurance. Nor did they cover so-called microfinance-plus programs, which provide training, health care or other interventions, along with credit. It’s quite possible that these or other specialized branches of microfinance practice do raise the living standards of the poor. But, if I may be so bold, even the best of these initiatives are probably less effective than we might have supposed.
This is good news. We in the microfinance community could use some humility. We’re financiers, not doctors, scientists, or teachers. To think that we can alter the lives of millions is hubris. more →
CGAP, 7 August 2013, co-authored with Emmanuelle Javoy
When you hear the word “Mimosa,” you might immediately think of the refreshing champagne cocktail. But now the MIMOSA – the Microfinance Index of Market Outreach and Saturation – also has relevance to financial inclusion. In brief, the MIMOSA is a simple way of measuring microfinance market capacity, an important complement to the approach described in a recent blog in this series by Annette Krauss and her colleagues from the University of Zurich. The key difference in the two approaches is that they work from entirely opposite starting points. more →
Financial Access Initiative, 5 June 2013
My last two posts described the high risk of a repayment crisis in Chiapas, Mexico, and its potentially devastating consequences to the microfinance sector around the world. But here is the good news: thus far there is no crisis, and one could still be avoided.
I have argued before that DFIs and other funders could leverage Smart Certification to enforce client protection practices and thus avoid the kind of overlending that’s happening in Chiapas. However, that prescription alone would not work in Mexico, mainly because a large number of Mexican MFIs are independent of foreign funding, and there are many other lenders active in the same space, including consumer finance companies and large retailers that provide credit.
The answer to avoiding a repayment crisis in Mexico will thus require government action, most likely new legislation that would bring all lenders under a common set of regulatory standards. Specifically, there are two key areas that must be addressed:
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Financial Access Initiative, 14 February 2013
It’s been over two years since the start of the great India insolvency. Four years since the Bosnia blight and No Pago Nicaragua. And nearly six years since the Morocco microfinance meltdown.
At this point, it’s reasonable to say that the first global crisis in microfinance has passed. Life is on the mend.
In a recent email, Alok Prasad, head of the Microfinance Institutions Network in India (MFIN) described its most recent quarterly report as “green shoots in evidence.” The numbers certainly bear him out. Elsewhere, investors speak of tightening their exposure to countries with overheating markets, pay attention to issues of overindebtedness, and are wary of the sort of runaway growth that was being posted by Indian MFIs back in 2008-10. more →
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