microfinance

Microfinance, a lead sector within the larger impact investing spectrum, has gained prominence from development-minded investors over the past decades. Initially, international funding into microfinance was generated largely from donor organizations, including public development agencies and private foundations. As the market gained traction, the role of private capital grew in importance as not only a means for microfinance institutions (MFIs) to reach scale, but also to increase their social outreach beyond what was possible with donor money. Private investors and donor agencies thus joined efforts in creating microfinance investment vehicles, better known in the industry jargon as “MIVs” or more simply “microfinance funds”. MIVs act as the main link between MFIs and the capital markets and usually provide debt financing, equity financing or a combination of both to MFIs located in emerging and frontier markets.

A lack of data is a significant bottleneck for financial institutions and development organizations. The same is true for knowledge about a targeted sector, especially when working in agriculture and agri-finance. Swisscontact’s Sustainable Cocoa Production Program (SCPP) in Indonesia, aiming to assist 130,000 cocoa farmers by 2020, tackles those two topics through training financial institutions about the cocoa sector and cocoa financials and shedding light on the financial situation and perception of cocoa farmers. Through an advanced program management database, SCPP is able to identify critical and interesting data relations. Baseline data of 17,429 farmers and first conclusions were compiled into a baseline report. This blog post highlights some findings from the report. One of the most important outcomes of our data analysis is the categorization of farmers into professional, progressing and unprofessional categories, and subcategorizing them into small, medium and large in terms of farm size. This leads to different approaches in targeting farmers, especially in the sense of formal Access to Finance (A2F).

Evidence continues to point towards financial inclusion’s role in helping people move out of poverty, reducing income inequality, and facilitating macroeconomic growth. It will be critical to helping the global community achieve the goal of eradicating poverty by 2030, especially as we strive to reach the places and people where it is most entrenched and the hardest to fight – such as in rural agricultural communities.

Each year, e-MFP launches the European Microfinance Award, in conjunction with the Luxembourg Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs and the Inclusive Finance Network Luxembourg (InFiNe.lu). The Award invites applications from financial institutions that are innovating, exploring and testing new ideas, that go beyond their core financial services, and exemplify the evolution of the microfinance sector beyond boilerplate microenterprise credit.

This week, e-MFP announced the launch of the 6th European Microfinance Award. This year, the Award will recognise one of most important challenges that some financial institutions face: providing financial services to vulnerable clients in post-conflict or post-crisis regions. As all e-MFP members well know, providing quality services to clients in stable markets poses many challenges – from managing portfolio risk, to expanding product offerings, hedging risk, understanding clients, adapting to regulatory changes, sourcing funds and innovating with new technologies.