The products and services of most West African insurance companies target corporate clients and those individuals that are not living in poverty.  The infrastructure of most insurance companies is not equipped to provide insurance to the poor.  Microinsurance premiums are low, administrative costs are high, and traditional distribution channels are not always effective.  Also, because premiums are low, microinsurance is a long term investment from the insurance company’s perspective as opposed to traditional insurance companies which collect larger premiums.  All of these factors combined, reports Business Day, a Nigerian business news source, result in scarce microinsurance offerings to West Africa’s poor populations.  Continue Reading »

Source: Advans Group.
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St. John’s University’s Peter J. Tobin College of Business is introducing a student-run Micro-Loan Program that actively engages students in international finance.  The initiative is being led by Ph.D. Dr. Linda Sama, St. John’s Associate Dean for Global Initiatives.  Dr. Sama says that the program, which is scheduled to launch during the Spring 2009 semester, marks “the next stage in business education on the global level.”  The program is also in line with St. John’s mission which includes ”using the university’s intellectual and physical resources to search out the causes of poverty and social injustice and to encourage solutions which are adaptable, effective, and concrete.”  The program has two goals: to explore the utility of microcredit as a tool for combating poverty in locales where banks are virtually non-existent and to expose students to the challenges of lending and collecting money in the developing world. Continue Reading »

THE ROLE OF CREDIT RATING AGENCIES IN MICROFINANCE Continue Reading »

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) issued a press release that they would be extending a total of $100 million in loans for a project intended to assist some of the estimated 150,000 poor farmers in southern Philippines - which includes six provinces in the autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao that have high levels of poverty. The funding consists of a loan of $70 million from ADB’s ordinary capital resources (OCR), and an additional $30 million from the OPEC Fund for International Development (OFID), which is administered by ADB. In addition to what ADB is funding, the Philippine government is contributing $52.4 million and local government units are contributing $56 million. All of the funding will go to the The Agrarian Reform Communities Project II (ACRP) which will allocate $135.2 million for rural infrastructure projects and $25.2 million for agriculture and enterprise development. The remaining funds will be used for capacity building, project implementation management, and contingencies. Continue Reading »

India’s National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) has proposed a new, multi faceted strategy to reposition itself as the economy changes, it was reported in the Financial Express. The changes include setting up a direct financing subsidiary for microfinance, separating NABARD Consultancy (NABCONS) into an independent subsidiary and creating an independent supervisory board over cooperative banks, among other, more general changes. The reason for these changes was cited as responding to “the changing economic scenario”. Continue Reading »