how kiva is dealing with currency risk

Professor Foote mentioned currency risk during his talk on Monday. Here is a link from Kiva's blog on how they try to deal with it.

microcredit as savings in reverse

title of this post, found on my favorite development blog.

next week's speaker

Next Monday's speaker is Dr. Kendall Mau, CEO of Prisma Microfinance. Here is his blog which looks good! Hopefully he is more interesting and informative than tonights speaker.

mf class- tonight!

A reminder that the Berkeley MF Simulcast starts tonight! We are hosting it in the Science Center, Room AG14, at 7:00pm. The class coordinators sent me the slides and suggest that you read the "Millions for Millions" article from the syllabus. If I didn't send you the syllabus or slides and you want to see them, just send me an email.

eye on microfinance

The Centre For Microfinance (CMF) has a really interesting newsletter that provides updates on their work and interviews with "sector experts." It can be pretty research oriented/technical but has a lot of good information. I thought this piece by Dean Karlan and Sendhil Mullainathan :"Is Microfinance Too Rigid?" was interesting (from issue #2)!

too many MFIs?

Cristina and I were talking the other day about the possibility of there being too many MFIs in a city/country/region. I found this post on Roodman's blog about this actually happening in El Salvador. Also on this point, here is a paper I have been meaning to read about how rising competition among MFIs affects client behavior. According to the abstract the authors found that competition has a negative effect on repayment rate as borrowers tend to start taking out multiple loans, but contrary to their hypothesis they don't find an increase in the client dropout rate.

"india calls on lenders to cut rates for poor"

here is the link to the financial times article i mentioned a couple of weeks ago. what do you all think?