Microfiance output rises

MICROFINANCE institutions have experienced increase in their productivity following financial literacy initiatives initiated by the microfinance expansion project (MEP) for their clients, Centre for Excellence in Financial Inclusion (CEFI) director Saliya Ranasinghe says.
“We help these financial institutions to tailor their products for the needs of their clients,” he said.
How we do that is, we conduct a small market research. We train their staff and we take them and do the market research and based on the research findings, we modify the existing products or we design the new products.
“Because of these products, the microfinance, their profitability have improved.
“The new training and good follow-up and the products are suiting the requirements of the clients and the repayments are much better and also the savings have improved.
“They are reaching the poor locations of the communities which have never been served before.”
Ranasinghe said one of the outputs was to create demand for the financial services among the people.
“What we have done is we have developed six educational modules in this country, savings, budgeting, financial services, financial negotiations, debt management and mobile phone banking.
“Out of that, we are only rolling out three of the learning programmes which are savings, budgeting and mobile phone banking.
“We don’t do the training. We do the materials, we identify partners and we give them training of trainers, and we provide them materials and we do onsite monitoring to make sure the quality is assured and they provide the information on how the progress is made.”
“We also provide business development services. One of the problems in this country, there are people who are doing training on BDS.
“But unfortunately they are doing training but they don’t start businesses because they are not linked to a bank. We identify the clients through the banks and we tell the banks, you tell us who are the good clients and we put them under this training so that they can give them a loan. And with street vendors and so forth, we basically upgrade them into a higher level.”