Where should poverty belong?

If, as Muhammad Yunus says, poverty should belong to museums, then development finance institutions must take one small step further, albeit a challenging one, towards that museum where poverty will be a thing of the past. With a development perspective on its heels, development finance institutions and their strategic partners must carry the torch of responsibility in crossing the threshold where there will be no stopping - not for the institution, not for its micro-clients, not for their poor communities.

No borders! Where funding is a need, development finance institutions must provide. If capacity building is the issue, training and business development services ought to be provided. As clients grow and ask for expanded BDS, innovate is the call of the day. When challenges rain, fortitude and resolve must pour. With the 2008 recession segueing onto 2009, with bank closures, petro price circuses, natural disasters and all, challenges are aplenty. One cannot help but wish for the good days of grade-school-of-old. Those public school grounds with bamboo trees for landscaping provide a lesson in resilience as bamboo trunks sway in all direction, bend and bow, but never breaking.

That resilience remains to be prevalent. Even as development finance institutions reel from various tests of strength and conviction, they remain resilient. They rise from the challenges, stronger than ever, never minding the borders, the boundaries that, left on their own, would have left one staggering, stagnating. Move on!

In the process of strengthening micro- and development finance institutions and supporting their end-clients, the building of economically self-sustainable communities is ensured. Now is the time to measure one's self against true social performance vis-a-vis fair economic development.

A Microfinance Renaissance

This year's Micro No More Stakeholders Conference is a renaissance of sorts, a rebirth of the fundamentals of microfinance even as we strive to bring our partner-MFIs and the MSMEntrepreneurs to new levels of empowerment and self-sustainability. One will always be eager to go into mobile banking, but the fundamentals of sound liquidity management need to be in place, always. Another will want to venture into sustainable development using renewable energy to power up micro-enterprises, but the basics of savings-credit-investment mix must not be forgotten. Expansion of territories through ATM networking is a nice dream, but are systems and procedures in place to adopt to the demands of branching?

As we try to explore new territories, this year we encourage our PFIs and their MSME clients to revisit the fundamentals of strengthening themselves, their clients, to be able to go about the novelty that is not without its challenges or even pitfalls.