Category: Microfinance

Microfinance and the housing value chain: Part 2, tweak what you do now

12 September, 2008 (08:29) | Education, Global, Housing, Innovations, Microfinance, Primer Posts | No comments

Yesterday’s post on my experience teaching a brand-new course, Mortgages for the Poor; An Overview of Products and Supporting Infrastructure at the world-famous Boulder Microfinance Training Program (MFT), brought us to the point of wanting to follow the customer. 

Whoever gets the customer first, wins!
 
The MFI customer needs and wants a housing-finance product, because traditional microfinance […]

Microfinance and the housing value chain: Part 1, follow your customer

11 September, 2008 (08:35) | Education, Global, Housing, Innovations, Microfinance, Primer Posts | No comments

Somewhere in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Heinlein describes his intellectual hero Professor Bernardo de la Paz working as an itinerant teacher on the Moon, teaching anything to anybody, by reading up furiously and staying a few weeks ahead of his syllabus.  It was with something not entirely dissimilar that I put together, and […]

Next time, do the math

6 June, 2008 (08:02) | Global news, Housing, Microfinance, NGOs | No comments

About a month back, a friend of mine working on housing and microfinance sent me a link to a Time Magazine article with the provocative title, Microfinance: Women Being Cheated?
 
As microfinance moves more and more into the mainstream of the banking world, is some of its original mission getting lost in the shuffle?
 

Notice how […]