Description of Sessions

Wednesday 22 March

Thursday 23 March

Friday 24 March

Description of Sessions

(In Chinese)

Wednesday 22 March

Plenary session

Panel 1 and 2: New Business Partnership Models for Microfinance outreach

Despite significant growth in microfinance over the past two decades, hundreds of millions of people around the world still do not have access to financial services. One of the main challenges facing the microfinance industry is the need for more creative solutions to dramatically expand the outreach and impact of its services.

The last five years has seen a period of increasing innovation. For example, exploiting the availability of new technologies, some institutions have adopted new models which link financial service providers to a wide range of non-traditional partners, such as retail and lottery outlets, post offices or self-help groups, resulting in rapid growth of outreach. However, such linkages, while promising, are not easy to set up and manage, nor are the necessary conditions for their success always available. Emerging trends indicate that the institutions most able to take advantage of these new models have been established formal financial actors such as banks, which raises interesting questions regarding the future role of specialist MFIs. Presentations will include experiences from around the world, including South America, India, China and other emerging Asian markets. Questions to be addressed include: Can strategic alliances between financial and other institutions help tackle the critical issue of outreach and impact of financial services? What are the role of policies and regulations in creating a favourable environment for such linkages? How are new technologies contributing to driving these changes? And what are the most promising approaches to addressing other constraints to the building such partnerships?

Plenary Panel 1

Plenary Panel 2

Break out groups

Group A: Increasing Outreach and sustainability of Microfinance through ICT

Making financial services available to the poorest people is recognized as an important part of poverty reduction strategies. However, in spite of its successes, microfinance has barely scratched the surface of need. While increasing outreach has been the catch-cry for the last decade and more, the present delivery models are not quite meeting the challenge, especially when it comes to serving communities in remote locations characterized by low population density. Technological innovation has emerged in the past decade as a great hope, through offering the potential to greatly reduce transaction costs - particularly in more remote areas. However, it may bring with it the need for fundamental changes to the microfinance delivery mechanisms that have become almost sacred for the microfinance sector. Panellists will share their experience on the use and impact of ICT on their activities, and its future potentials.

Group B: Deepening outreach of financial services to the poorest

In the early decades of the microfinance industry, a common tconsensus emerged that microfinance services – and particularly small loans for micro-enterprise development – were not appropriate strategies to address the needs of the very poor. However, in recent years, several innovations in the field have begun to challenge this view, particularly in Asia. Questions to be addressed in this session include: What strategies are being adopted to promote very poor clients into mainstream microfinance programs? How can the impact of microfinance services on lifting people out of poverty be improved? Can both the financial and the social goals of microfinance be met simultaneously? Common performance measures for microfinance focus almost exclusively on the institutions’ financial performance, but are they adequate indicators, on their own, of what is really happening in the lives of clients? In this context, experiences from Asia, in particular, Bangladesh will be presented and discussed.

Group C: Building successful multi-stakeholder partnership in Microfinance

Multi-stakeholder partnerships have rapidly gained influence as a promising approach to sustainable development in a range of fields, including as a means of delivering financial services to the poor. This includes a wide range of linkage arrangements involving banks, MFIs, NGOs, community associations, government agencies and other entities in both finance and non-finance sectors. Such partnerships bring together the combined and complementary resources of a range of players to maximize new business opportunities, increase outreach and/or sharpen the developmental impact of microfinance. Partnerships are not a panacea and they are not appropriate in all circumstances - but when implemented well, the resulting win-win solutions can have profound effects. This session will take a critical look the characteristics of successful partnerships in microfinance, and the processes needed to build them, based on practical experience from the field.

Group D: Innovative rural finance approaches to serve the poor
A session organized by IFAD

Sustainability of rural finance institutions is a key issue for the continuous delivery of microfinance services on a large scale and thus for an effective contribution on poverty reduction. In this context IFAD, will share its experience and work in Asia on the strengthening of rural finance institutions. Specific presentations will focus on IFAD's partnership programs in China and in India.

Thursday 23 March

Plenary session

Partnerships for Access to Capital and Products

If microfinance services are to rapidly expand to meet the needs of the hundreds of millions of poor people who currently do not have access, a major constraint that will need to be overcome is access to capital for the institutions providing the services. Furthermore, broadening the range of products to service the diverse needs of this market will also be required, for example in the provision of micro insurance and money-transfer services. The historical growth of the industry initially depended to a significant degree on access to government and donor funding or subsidy, but as the industry has progressively commercialized, MFIs have increasingly turned to commercial sources of capital. This session will look at some of the recent innovations and approaches to addressing these issues, including tapping into private investment, role of equity investment funds, the potential of the international and domestic remittances market, and innovative partnership and business models to link MFIs with capital markets.

Friday 24 March

Plenary session

Creating an enabling environment for microfinance

Development of the microfinance industry has taken strikingly different paths in different parts of the world, reflecting, in large part, conditions in the broader environment beyond the control of microfinance providers themselves. Particularly crucial is the role that governments play in promoting and enabling the delivery of financial services to the poor, and how this role of the state interacts with that of the private sector and civil society.
Current consensus in the industry discourages direct government involvement in the delivery of financial services – a legacy of the poor past record of highly subsidized, supply-driven credit programs which proved costly and acted as a disincentive for the development of private sector finance providers through crowding out competition and undermining credit discipline. At the same time, it is clear that governments play a critical role in building financial services that work for the poor through providing sound policy frameworks, encouraging competition and ensuring prudent regulation and supervision that protects consumers at the same time as supporting broader and deeper outreach of financial services. Given that microfinance does not generally provide a significant systemic risk to the financial system, traditional public sector regulators have often given little emphasis to the sub-sector. However, in terms of the numbers of people served, microfinance is very significant in many Asian countries. This session will examine these issues, based on practical examples from Asia, and particularly on the Chinese context, and on models for regulation and supervision in the Philippines.

Break Out groups

Group A: Regulations regarding access to capital

The session will discuss the legal and regulatory framework for MFI investment transactions and the impact of this on investor confidence in MFIs. Discussion will attempt to address the following questions: what regulatory practices promote investor confidence and provide the impetus to increase private investment in microfinance? At what point do legal and regulatory obstacles become too costly to bear and deter commercial investment in microfinance? The session will focus on practical examples from China, Nepal and other Asian countries, as well as drawing on international experiences which are relevant to the Asian context.

Group B: Policies and Regulations to expand Electronic Banking for the Poor

Electronic banking has great potential to reduce transaction costs and increase outreach thus enabling a better access to services for those who live in the remote rural areas. Many governments have started to implement policies which encourage the expansion of electronic banking. Policy and regulatory issues include those factors that directly affect the take-up or scaling up of electronic banking, including regulatory barriers and supervision costs. They also include issues outside of the finance sector, including policies and strategies on telecommunications and the rollout of IT infrastructure, as well as broad issues of illiteracy, technical support capacity, security and trust. The BWTP has initiated a research program on this topic in 4 countries in Asia and interim conclusions will be presented and discussed.

Group C: Importance of Transparency for Microfinance Development

The microfinance industry has grown rapidly over the last decade, and thousands of microfinance Institutions (MFI’s) have appeared globally. With this increased interest, comes the need for increased transparency amongst MFI’s in order to demonstrate performance to stakeholders, and to attract investors and capital as markets become more competitive. Transparency is increasingly important in terms of building credibility with regulators and donors as well as informing them about the sector. It also contributes to stronger MFI’s performance by generating critical information for MF’s management and decision-making. With a diverse panel, including a rater, a rating fund, an investor and two microfinance institutions, the potential benefits of increased transparency of the Microfinance industry will be discussed from a range of perspectives

Plenary session

The future of Microfinance in Asia

Prior sessions of the conference have introduced and discussed a range of important developments in the microfinance industry that have arisen in the recent past, and which may significantly influence the future development of the industry. Panelists from three different organizations will summarize these trends give their perspectives on how they see the microfinance in Asia developing into the future.