NEWS WIRE: United States: Pro Mujer Combines Cancer Screenings with Microfinance

Pro Mujer, an organization that funds microcredit cooperatives in Latin America, also provides women’s health screenings, using a special van retrofitted with medical consultation rooms and staffed by a nurse and doctor.

The vans travel into remote parts of southern Peru, combining financial help with preventative health care and education.

It’s based on a simple fact that people who are poor tend to get sick, and people who are sick easily become poor, or deeper in debt. Rick Beckett, CEO of Global Partnerships, gave the example of Pro Mujer’s work at a talk last night about the future of microfinance.

About 150 million people around the world have borrowed money through the system of microcredit pioneered by the Grameen Bank. Once the model showed promise, investors started flocking to it.

The last decade has seen an explosion of commercialization, exemplified by Compartamos, a lucrative Mexican bank that started as a non-profit but ended up going public in 2007 and now charges more than 80 percent interest on microloans.

Commercialization is necessary for raising the amount of money needed to get microcredit to the millions who could benefit, Beckett said. But the profit-motive also leads lenders to bypass the poorest people.

Commercial capital goes to the most profitable microfinance institutions. It turns out that poor people at the bottom are not as profitable as others farther up, and it’s easier to make money in dense urban areas than in rural ones, he said.

The situation has parallels with healthcare in the U.S. “Economic incentives are very powerful,” he said. “You can make a lot more money in health care if you serve healthy 65-year-olds than sick 89-year-olds.”

Beckett, who had an earlier career as an investor and led the healthcare practice for McKinsey & Co, said the U.S. needs “vibrant, well capitalized insurance providers that have a different economic motivation” and “socially motivated, probably non-profit insurance coverage.”

Likewise the microfinance industry needs organizations like Pro Mujer that make a profit but reinvest it in the effort to improve lives.

Pro Mujer’s mobile medical clinics provide cervical cancer testing. Before joining the organization, only about one-third of the women had ever had a gynecological exam. Eventually 95 percent of them had been tested. In Nicaragua, Pro Mujer helped give 9,000 tests over four years, which detected tumors in 700 women who otherwise would not have known they needed treatment.

Global Partnerships is now working on a business enterprise for Pro Mujer so it has a long-term source of funding for the healthcare services. The Seattle non-profit has committed about $52 million toward microfinance in Latin America.

Testing for cervical cancer in developing countries is getting some help from Merck and QIAGEN. The companies said today they would collaborate on a new program to increase access to HPV vaccination and HPV DNA testing in some of the poorest areas of the world, calling the partnership the first time a vaccine manufacturer and a molecular diagnostics company are addressing the burden of cervical cancer together with a comprehensive approach.

Their commitments were announced at the annual meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative.

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