** Please note: The information on this page is for the 2011 program. Please visit early in 2012 for the updated 2012 program information. **
SMDP-Tanzania Course Descriptions
Participants Can Choose From Four Week-Long Workshops
or the Two Week CMMF Programme Design and CMMF
MIS sequence*
Workshop #1
Community Managed Microfinance (CMMF): Programme Design
and Implementation Management
Facilitator:
Hugh Allen
It is becoming generally accepted that conventional microfinance approaches are unable to reach the majority of the rural poor (particularly in Africa) with a suite of appropriate financial services. This is owing to cost and the relatively limited debt capacity of the poorest. In addition, there is an increasing awareness of the primary importance of savings services, which most MFIs do not provide.
In the last ten years this gap is increasingly filled by community-managed microfinance groups (known generically as savings groups), in which members mobilise and manage their own savings, investing this money in a loan fund from which they can borrow in amounts as small as one dollar. This approach is proving to be low cost, highly sustainable, profitable for the member-owners, and achieving significant scale. It is also promoted by most of the major international development agencies.
The objectives of the course are to:
- Present the theoretical background to community-managed microfinance
- Visit a savings group and witness a savings and credit meeting
- Be exposed to the methodological approaches and training tools employed the major implementing organisations
- Receive an introduction to the most widely-used management information system
- Offer approaches to evaluation and the results of impact studies
- Be introduced to the most successful approaches to programme design
Workshop #2
Community Managed Microfinance (CMMF): Management Information Systems
Offered in Week Two Only, October 17-21
Facilitator: Hugh Allen
This course is a companion to the first week’s course, but is designed principally for practitioners who are already implementing a community-managed microfinance programme or who intend to do so.
The course focuses exclusively on the use of the VSL Associates management information system, which is the most widely used in savings group programmes. The course covers the following:
- Organisational structure and MIS
- Financial logic
- Data requirements, definitions, collection, and auditing
- Configuration and data input
- Data outputs
- Reports, analysis, and management applications
- Administrative tools
The course will provide participants with a thorough understanding of the latest version of the VSL Associates MIS (4.01) and an introduction to the Savings Groups Information Exchange, an online reporting system for agencies that promote community-managed microfinance.
Participants must come with a reasonably capable laptop, with Excel 2003 or 2007 installed, plus a clean, recently formatted USB pin drive. Note: Tanzania uses the British square peg 240 Volt plug style so be sure to bring an adapter if your laptop has another type of connector.
Workshop #3
Village Finance
Facilitator: Brett Matthews
This one-week program will appeal to practitioners from NGOs, from village finance networks, or from downscaling banks who develop (or plan to develop) financial intermediaries of any type that will be owned and controlled by villagers. Such intermediaries are ubiquitous in development practice and include village banks, self-help groups, and SACCOs/credit unions, as well as time-limited groups like VSLAs, among many other variants.
Participants will greatly improve their capacity to plan for, and then successfully incubate, sustainable villager-controlled financial institutions. They will become familiar with generally accepted good practices in sound institutional development (practices that have been widely ignored in NGO practice), and with key lessons that have been learned from the historical experience and evidence underpinning those practices.
The curriculum includes a number of practical tools that have never before been available in village finance.
- An on-site audit tool that can quickly identify problems with a village finance institution by interpolating a current balance sheet from records and individual interviews. It is suited to permanent intermediaries with less than 100 members, and can be implemented in half a day by a team of two people with grade 8-10 education.
- Lecture, group work, and discussion, followed by group field practice
- The ‘SOCRATES’ oral MIS tools, including a diagnostic tool that gives practitioners the capacity to pinpoint how well members understand the retail interface (their passbooks, loans contracts, branch signage, etc.) and development tools that give them the capacity to improve retail transparency while providing a ‘bridge’ to practical numeracy skills for members.
- Lecture and discussion, followed by group field practice (if time permits).
- A member-oriented governance tool that analyzes the governance system of a village finance institution or model based on transaction cost economics (TCE), and leads participants towards a constructive, action-oriented approach to strengthening the governance system.
- Lecture and group work/presentations, followed by class review and discussion.
Mathwood programming is guided by the philosophy that any village finance methodology can be executed well, and that the good practitioner must have practical exposure to multiple systems, and the orientation and capacity to improve any system through cross-fertilization.
Workshop #4
Advanced Practitioner Seminar: How to Add Value to Savings Groups
Through Other Activities
Facilitator: Paul Rippey
Savings Group programs frequently include Other Activities (OAs). Some prominent examples:
• In Mali, the Savings for Change program gives all savings group members a short course in malaria prevention that is integrated with the group training.
• In Uganda, some local NGOs are using their networks of savings groups to sell solar lamps to members and non-members; the revenue helps keep trainers working after grant funding is exhausted.
• In Tanzania, groups have been linked to marketing cooperatives to help those members who are farmers make more money.
OAs can be training, distribution, or sales of social or commercial products, linkages to governmental, NGO, or private sector programmes; the creation of federations and networks; or any other additional good or service beyond the simple provision of the core financial services of Savings Groups. OAs are already widespread, and as local NGOs and international NGOs become more aware of the efficiencies of working through networks of savings groups, they will become even more common.
The purpose of this workshop is to begin to determine the principles that make for effective Other Activities. What makes them sustainable? When are they good for the groups, and when are they good for local partners? What are the pitfalls?
Aga Khan Foundation conducted a series of studies in 2009-2011 on OAs, and the results have been synthesized into a document that will be available to the participants. This workshop is designed to build on some of what that research uncovered, and add to it the experience of participants, to begin to move towards guidelines for savings group promoters who want to add value to savings groups.
This workshop is for experienced practitioners of savings groups who believe that groups do not want to remain static, and who want to work with colleagues to determine how the growth and evolution of savings groups can be healthy and valuable for participants. During the workshop, the participants will have a chance to do some basic field research to find out what other activities members of groups have started, or would like to start; we will find out why they have done, or haven’t done, other activities. This is a workshop, not a course: the participants will be expected to participate wholeheartedly to learn together, along with the facilitator, and it is hoped that the participants will form an on-going collaborative group to continue to share experiences via the Internet after the workshop.