Microfinance Managers Consider Online Funding: Is It Finance, Marketing, or Something Else?

Online platforms are changing the way we engage with the world. Facebook links, eBay auctions, ePal chats, even Second Life avatars—these are all online platforms that connect people, ideas, products, and markets. These platforms shape who we connect with as well as how we connect. This concept extends to philanthropy: Online philanthropy is changing the nature of how and where people give.1 An outgrowth of online philanthropy is online social investing. Kiva.org is one of the best known online lending and investment platforms. Since its launch in 2005, Kiva has grabbed the attention (and wallets) of over 350,000 online lenders, called “Kiva Lenders,” who are eager to loan as little as $25 or$50 to microentrepreneurs through Kiva and its microfinance institution (MFI) partners. Kiva has inspired many other new online lending platforms. Not surprisingly, Kiva’s success also has gained the attention of a growing number of MFIs that are searching for the capital and public awareness that the Kiva online lending platform often can provide. Kiva’s marketing function is hard to quantify, but Kiva’s widespread presence in the news and entertainment media, ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the Oprah Winfrey Show, makes Kiva and the MFIs whose clients are featured on Kiva.org important ambassadors for microfinance. This growth in online lending and investment platforms presents an opportunity and a challenge for MFIs intent on tapping the potential of online lenders or investors. This paper focuses on the demand side of the equation and highlights issues that MFIs may want to consider before signing up for a loan from an online lending platform

A Vision for Scaling Microfinance: More Than Dollars and Smarts

The following is a stock-taking of some of the key initiatives that have taken place to date in the world of microfinance at building an international financial architecture that attracts and retains flows of commercial capital to microfinance. It also is a call to those of us in the microfinance world to do much, much more

Doing Good While Doing Deals: Early Lesson in Launching an International Transactions Clinic

That is not to say that the launch of this clinic was easy. Four of the most challenging issues the ITC faced in its first year of operation were: 1) developing a client pool, 2) defining client projects so as to be appropriate to student clinicians’ skill levels and capacity, 3) making use of efficient and inexpensive technology to foster international communication with clients and transaction management, and 4) tapping supervisory attorney talent capable of supporting student clinicians in their international transactional work. The first two issues were the biggest challenges that we faced in launching the ITC and so this article focuses on how we 1) developed our initial client pool for the ITC, and 2) defined client projects that could be served by a law clinic such as ours

Beyond Microfinance: Creating Opportunities for Women at the Base of the Pyramid

A growing number of innovative social entrepreneurs are tackling this problem by creating \u27busmesses in a bag\u27 mspired by the world\u27s largest direct seller of beauty products - Avon. These very small franchise or consignment businesses are affordable enough to be acquired and operated by women living at the base of the economic pyramid. Just as commercial franchise networks such as Avon have helped people with httle or no experience grow mto successful business owners around the world, microfranchise and microconsignment networks may hold similar promise

Doing Good While Doing Deals: Early Lesson in Launching an International Transactions Clinic

That is not to say that the launch of this clinic was easy. Four of the most challenging issues the ITC faced in its first year of operation were: 1) developing a client pool, 2) defining client projects so as to be appropriate to student clinicians’ skill levels and capacity, 3) making use of efficient and inexpensive technology to foster international communication with clients and transaction management, and 4) tapping supervisory attorney talent capable of supporting student clinicians in their international transactional work. The first two issues were the biggest challenges that we faced in launching the ITC and so this article focuses on how we 1) developed our initial client pool for the ITC, and 2) defined client projects that could be served by a law clinic such as ours

Launch of an International Transactions Clinic: Doing Good While Doing Deals

September 2008 marked the launch of the International Transactions Clinic (ITC) at the University of Michigan Law School, the first legal clinic of its kind to combine an international and transactional focus. As Law School Dean Evan Caminker said upon the launch of the ITC, “[t]his is an exciting opportunity to involve a new generation of bright legal minds in cross-border transactions that will train our students for a lifetime of international business dealings, and that can also make an enormous difference in the lives of people in the developing world.

Resolving Impact Investment Disputes: When Doing Good Goes Bad

Impact investing, or investing with the goal of generating financial returns, is pursued within the context of advancing social goals. This Article describes the state of impact investing today and focuses on how to respond to impact investments that go awry by failing to meet investors’ financial expectations (rather than those that fail to meet investors’ social expectations). Burand then evaluates the appropriateness of using international arbitration as a dispute resolution mechanism for cross-border impact investing disputes, and suggests other resolution mechanisms that are capable of settling these disputes

Teaching Transactional Skills and Law in an International Context

Today, we are going to be discussing how we think about transactional skills in an international context. It doesn\u27t surprise me that this is a smaller group. This is a subspecialty, but let me just do a very quick survey of you. How many of you now in this room are teaching an international course? And what are you doing

Microfranchising: A Business Approach to Fighting Poverty

Imagine a franchise network that trains, guides, and supports hundreds of poor women with little or no business experience to become successful business owners. Such microfranchise efforts, though relatively small in number, have been gathering steam in the development community and, recently, attracting the attention of the mainstream franchising indus- Deborah Burand try. Advocates have seized on microfranchising as a natural complement or follow-on to the widely acclaimed successes of the microfinance sector, which provides small-scale finance services to over 150 million of the world\u27s poor. Microfranchising today is where microfinance was a decade or more ago. It is appropriate at this juncture, then, to ask: What guidance can microfranchising usefully draw from the microfinance experience? The first section of this article examines lessons learned from the microfinance sector and then traces the origins of microfranchising. The second section explores whether mainstream commercial franchising practices are relevant for franchising that takes place with those living at the base of the economic pyramid. The final section recommends the legal and regulatory environment that can best facilitate microfranchising

In vivo dose-response of insects to Hz-2V infection

BACKGROUND: Hz-2V infection of female Helicoverpa zea moths is manifested as insects that are either sterile "agonadal" individuals with malformed reproductive tissues or fertile asymptomatic carriers which are capable of transmitting virus on to their progeny. Virus infected progeny arising from eggs laid by asymptomatic carrier females may themselves be either sterile agonadals or asymptomatic carriers. RESULTS: By injecting virus into female moths, a correlation was established between virus doses administered to the females and the levels of resulting asymptomatic and sterile progeny. CONCLUSIONS: The results of these experiments indicate that high virus doses produced a higher level of agonadal progeny and lower doses produced higher levels of asymptomatic carriers