GreenMicrofinancing

 

J2008 Tech Awards TONIGHT!  Join a Live Webcast   7:00 pm PST

Mr. D. Vidya Sagar, Director of SKG Sangha, INDIA, is part of an esteemed group of 2008 Tech Laureates, who were selected from hundreds of nominations representing 68 countries.  Today, twenty-five innovators from around the world, recognized for developing and applying technology to benefit humanity, will receive the 2008 Tech Award in San Jose, California.  

These Laureates have developed new technological solutions or innovative ways to use existing technologies to significantly improve the lives of people around the world.  This year, the 2008 Laureates represent the truly global vision of the program, spanning countries such as Senegal, Peru, Hungary, Canada, Namibia, Germany, Egypt, India, United Kingdom, Laos and the United States. Their work impacts people in many more countries worldwide.

Professor Muhammad Yunus, pioneer of microcredit and founder of Grameen Bank, is the recipient of the 2008 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award. Dr. Yunus will accept this distinguished honor during The Tech Awards Gala tonight! 

GreenMicrofinance team welcomes Mr. D. Vidya Sagar, this coming weekend to Philadelphia as our guest.  On Saturday evening, we are hosting an event, Harnessing Clean Energy to Microfinance: Waste is Wealth, during which Mr. Sagar will be sharing on biogas technologies that address a range of issues including energy, sanitation, poverty, health, and education.  Please check Betsy Teutsch's blog post for more information on our First Delaware Valley Event.   

 

J2008 Tech Awards TONIGHT!  Join a Live Webcast   7:00 pm PST

Mr. D. Vidya Sagar, Director of SKG Sangha, INDIA, is part of an esteemed group of 2008 Tech Laureates, who were selected from hundreds of nominations representing 68 countries.  Today, twenty-five innovators from around the world, recognized for developing and applying technology to benefit humanity, will receive the 2008 Tech Award in San Jose, California.  

These Laureates have developed new technological solutions or innovative ways to use existing technologies to significantly improve the lives of people around the world.  This year, the 2008 Laureates represent the truly global vision of the program, spanning countries such as Senegal, Peru, Hungary, Canada, Namibia, Germany, Egypt, India, United Kingdom, Laos and the United States. Their work impacts people in many more countries worldwide.

Professor Muhammad Yunus, pioneer of microcredit and founder of Grameen Bank, is the recipient of the 2008 James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award. Dr. Yunus will accept this distinguished honor during The Tech Awards Gala tonight! 

GreenMicrofinance team welcomes Mr. D. Vidya Sagar, this coming weekend to Philadelphia as our guest.  On Saturday evening, we are hosting an event, Harnessing Clean Energy to Microfinance: Waste is Wealth, during which Mr. Sagar will be sharing on biogas technologies that address a range of issues including energy, sanitation, poverty, health, and education.  Please check Betsy Teutsch's blog post for more information on our First Delaware Valley Event.   

Our road to the NetImpact conference was very fortuitous.  Listening to WHYY (our local NPR radio) on a roadtrip in July, I heard a great interview with Muhammad Yunus.  One of the call-in questioners was Emily Schiller, a Wharton student who mentioned that she is the chair of NetImpact's national conference entitled "The Sustainable Advantage: Creating Social and Environmental Value".  Since GreenMicrofinance is based in the Philly area, not far from Wharton, I scribbled Emily's name down and tracked her down to meet.  Over coffee I realized that the July broadcast was actually a replay of Yunus' January visit to Philadelphia - he spoke at the Free Library, and I was there.  Fortunately it was not too late for us to be included in the NetImpact program, since our missions match so perfectly.

My session, a Friday lunch RoundTable, is titled " Microfinance Meets Climate Change: How OffsettingYour Ipod Can Provide Clean Energy for the Bottom of the Pyramid".  When I began to learn how big a difference just a minuscule amount of locally generated clean renewable electricity can make in the life of microfinance clients, by lowering their overhead and expanding their use of lights and light appliances like cellphones or radios,  I was astonished.  Wouldn't it be great if we could somehow share some of our electricity, which we take for granted and use quite wastefully?   Kind of like when your mom scolded you about wasting food, when children were starving in Armenia....

Microfinance can actually make this possible.  We'll kick around the numbers at the session, seeing how to balance an average American household's electrical consumption (about 11,040 kWh a year) with an entry level solar system for a microfinance client's 74 kWh a year.  Small as that sounds, it  is enough  to power four hours of lights, charge a cellular, and play a radio or energy-efficient computer! 

After a fair amount of research, we can say with confidence that the amount of energy used in charging an Ipod for four hours daily for a year - get this - would power a third world family for 3 1/2 weeks!

Stay tuned!  

Photo from AME SUD.

Photo by Pamoj - women extracting jatropha oil

For those who live in the industrialized world, our experience of a non-electrified existence is very limited.  For many of us, the normalcy of turning on light switches and plugging in appliances to do our work goes back 3 or 4 generations.  Electrical access is so ubiquitous as to be virtually invisible.  So extensive is our lack of attention to electricity that when we lose it in, say, a storm-related black-out, we are surprised at how many of our systems stop working.  Landlines, boilers, hot water, in addition to the obvious refrigeration/freezer system, garage doors, and traffic lights – you name it.  Without electricity modern life quickly is dismantled.  Candles, flashlights, crank radios, and neighbors suddenly appear.  But such outages are temporary; in a worst-case dismal scenario, maybe a few days.

 

In the developing world, the absence of electrification forces 1.8 billion people to make do without the blessings so many of us take for granted, because we have never known life without them.  It means long, hard hours of physical labor, performing tasks that take us moments.  It means lugging firewood or dung to burn and living with smoky air.  Or using kerosene lamps and buying and transporting the fuel for them in small, expensive amounts.  It means going to bed when it’s dark.  It means using precious fuel to boil water, just to purify it, since if there isn’t electricity, there’s likely not running water either.  It means doing chores during daylight, instead of attending school.  It means dependence on generators or expensive, single-use batteries, since it’s not possible to recharge batteries without electricity. 

 

The overall term for this grossly inequitable distribution of the world’s power sources is energy poverty.  It is one of many ways that the world’s poorest remain so, in a discouraging cycle of hard work not yielding any way out of marginal existence.  It is both an ethical issue as well as a win-win opportunity for entrepreneurial solutions.  In a world which is meeting its maximum carbon load as well as peak oil, the future for the 1.8 billion without access to energy is undeniably through alternative, renewable, clean energy technologies, jumpstarted by infusions of capital.  Since third world families consume such modest amounts of energy relative to the West, small inputs of micro-hydro, solar, biofuel, or micro-wind generated energy have the potential to provide a crucial toehold on the ladder up out of subsistence, bringing enhanced health and literacy along, too!

 

Let us join together to not just solve these problems, but thrive together, on a greener, more just earth.

This past week at the summit a major topic was interest rate transparency, as some MFIs have come under fire for charging relatively high rates and allowing "mission drift" to move them to a priority of high profits instead of the original mission of poverty alleviation. Long time microfinance insider Chuck Waterfield has taken the initiative to address these concerns, launching MicroFinance Transparency.

A highlight for me was the lively discussion between Professor Muhammed Yunus, Damian von Stauffenberg (the founder of MicroRate), and Chuck. They debated the importance of the profit motive in growing microfinance, with Yunus holding firm to the ideal of not making a profit, seeking only to break-even and pass any potential profits back to the clients. In my view microfinance has always been a profitable business proposition, with profit driving the ability to expand the reach of poverty alleviation efforts. Perhaps the debate should be reframed around reinvesting profits to expand reach vs. passing profits on to outside investors. Or is it possible to do both?

 The topic is getting great press in the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Forbes, and many more (100+ stories listed when I searched Google News).  It's great to see this positive move coming from inside the Microfinance community to address these issues now rather than later.
 
With current energy price pressures, environmental degradation, and climate change looming, we at GreenMicrofinance hope to lead a similar movement among MFIs, disclosing standardized metrics of environmental impact and sustainablility.

On Tuesday night I thought I was back in the cellular industry with the start-up of the Qualcomm Indonesian village phone program, Uber ESIA. They had a big launch party complete with dancers and music, and free flowing food and drinks. Professor Yunis was the featured speaker but of course, the real treat was the conversations with people like the movie producer from New York that is working on a film about Grameen. Gayle Ferrario has produced two films about Grameen and the 3^rd promises to be spectacular.

I also had a chance to visit with the visionary founder and head of Grameen Shakti, Dipul Barua. We were able to talk at length about his experience in making clean, renewable energy available to over 100,000 homes.

On Wednesday morning there was a break in our schedule so Dan, Elizabeth and I were able to see a little more of Bali than the hotel and convention center; in this case one of the six Hindu temples in Bali. On the 40 minute drive to the temple, we must have passed 10 other temples and then suddenly we crossed a ridgeline and were looking through the mist at huge (30 ft) breakers rolling in from the Indian Ocean and crashing into the 300 ft cliffs. No wonder Bali is considered a surfers paradise and of course Dan was very disappointed the surfing contest that is currently going on was a kilometer away and 100 meters below.

 

 

As we were getting out of the car, our driver warned us about the monkeys; it seems they will take glasses and earrings and trade them back for food; pretty smart little guys. As it turned out, the visit was uneventful, but the scenery was spectacular and the peace divine. This is still an active temple, so we were not able to go in all the parts and since Dan was wearing shorts when we arrived, he was covered with a sarong on the tour.

When we returned, Dan found out that his efforts to setup an interview with Professor Yunus had been rewarded so I got to have a 15 minute, on camera dialogue with him; what a privilege, video to follow!

And then when I got back to my hotel, I had a call from my son who had arrived in Bali. He lives and works in the Middle East and I haven’t seen him in ‘too long’ so this is an extra, special treat!

Today was a breakthrough!  Since 2002, GreenMicrofinance has been participating and leading panels on microfinance and the environment at various Microcredit Summit gatherings- Bangladesh 2004; Chile 2005, Halifax 2006, and today in Bali. 

During today's session on Microfinance, Their Clients, and Clean Energy: Making a Positive Impact on the Environment there was a definite shift in interest and ‘energy' around the topic.  THE LIGHTS ARE ON!

Craig Wilson from The Foundation for Development Cooperation based in Australia and my colleague, Kathleen Robbins from GreenMicrofinance, provided a macro overview of moving forward with clean energy and the microfinance.   

We then shifted to the local perspective.  Paul Thomas, Founder and Exective Director,  Evangelical Social Action Forum (ESAF), India, and Chitta Ranjan Chaki, Deputy General Manager, Grameen Shakti, Bangladesh, both provided very comprehensive overviews of their clean energy initiatives.  

ESAF in partnership with GreenMicrofinance (and Microenergy International) is developing a clean energy lending program; they recently completed a market survey of 1,200 clients in four States in which they work.  A couple of highlights from the survey include:

• Majority of these people use firewood for cooking purposes; even if they do have LPG connections they prefer to use firewood stoves (comparatively cheaper source)
• Waste generated in each household could be processed to produce renewable clean energy.

One can't help but be impressed with the work of Grameen Shakti, which incorporated in 1996, and which provides energy services in remote rural areas of Bangladesh. GS sells, installs, and maintains solar photovoltaic systems, and has biogas, solar thermal, and wind programs.  

The session was very well attended with about 45 participants from government, NGOs, energy service providers, national banks, advocacy groups, and microfinance institutions.  We invited the group to post on this blog some of their thoughts and questions to further the dialogue on this panel theme.   

From my own perspective, I think we need to clearly identify our vision within the microfinance sector, continue to develop innovative solutions, and promote champions (like Paul Thomas and Chitta Chaki), who will reenergize communities to work together to conserve our natural environment and to promote environmental justice.  

The energy and microfinance presentation went well today.  I opened my talk, reminding people of the ‘bad omens' Professor Yunus sees on the horizon: rising food and fuel prices, slowing economy, climate change and environmental degradation and the estimate that 100 million people are in danger of slipping back into abject poverty unless these issues are addressed successfully.

It was disappointing there weren't more people at the session, but the people who were there were amazing, as is the work Grameen Shakti is doing in Bangladesh and ESAF in India.  The Managing Director, Dipal Barua showed me his daily solar panel installation count, more 300 yesterday.  When I visited Shakti in 2003 they were doing less than 20 installations a day.  There really is a demand for energy!

This afternoon I did interviews with five amazing women; Gita and Silvia from Indonesia, Maree and Rebecca from Australia and Maaike from the Netherlands via Australia.  All had fascinating stories about their current work and their path to the Microcredit Summit.  The discussions ranged far and wide, but focused on renewable energy and microfinance's role in getting clean energy into the hands of the those at the "Base of the Pyramid'!

Dan will be editing these interviews and will have them on the blog shortly!

On the way to the opening ceremony, Dan and I had a discussion with several people from UDDIPAN . I had a chance to chat with Sawkat Ali Talukder, Deputy Director.   UDDIPAN, in Bangladesh (based in Dhaka), reaches 300,000 clients, has nearly 3,000 employees, and was founded in 1986. Approximately 20% of the clients have no electricity.  They plan on integrating a solar energy progam in the future, perhaps 1 or 2 years from now.

It was encouraging to hear during the opening ceremony several comments by dignitaries regarding the food and fuel crisis. Dr. Boediono, governor of Bank Indonesia, mentioned that food and energy prices on a global scale have escalated and we need to recalibrate our priorities in the microfinance field. Dr. Yunus also said:

"The climate condition and environmental degradation of the world makes it difficult to achieve the Millennium Development Goals"

How do we come up with solutions within the microcredit field to address this food and fuel crisis, and at the same time reduce poverty?  Share your thoughts.

I am home! After a long flight yesterday, Kathleen and I made our way in a taxi through the streets of Nusa Dua from the airport to our hotel. The warm balmy night air and smell of the ocean in Bali felt as if I were back in Commonwealth of Dominica - and at the same time the all-familiar ride weaving through the street with thousands of motor scooters alongside the little roadside kiosks brought me back to my time in India and Nepal.

Dan, Kathleen, and I have been warmly welcomed by our hosts at the Microcredit Summit Campaign, as well as by Sam Daley-Harris and Professor Yunus. We had lunch at a beach-side café with Denise Hughes, a public relations associate who has worked with the Summit Campaign for ten years. With a strong interest in the environment, she would like to join Dan, Kathleen, and me as another blogger from Bali. We welcome her input over the next days.


Dan led Kathleen and me on an afternoon adventure trying to locate a business selling solar and wind systems that he discovered yesterday after his arrival in Bali. Our taxi driver finally caught a glimpse of SPI (Solar Power Indonesia) with its small wind turbine and solar panel on top of the complex building. Although SPI was closed, we hope to visit some of their installation sites.

As so many colleagues gather, I wonder as we look at microfinance over the next 10 years, what will be the most important drivers for the industry. We are interested in what others have to say and hope to post some responses over the next few days.

Thanks USAID microLINKS for this wonderful opportunity here in Bali.