Fellow Presentations: Day 2 (Steve Ketchpel)

Your humble blogger, Steve Ketchpel gave the next talk. My slides are available, but you're probably more interested in the summary. I started off with a case study of a successful microcredit borrower, and continued with some additional stats to back up the success of microcredit from both a borrower's and lender's point of view. Given the benefits, there seems no reason not to aim to reach ten times as many people, so I turned to some of the approaches that might be used to scale microfinance, including organizational growth (e.g., Unitus), software development (e.g., moap project), and debt securitization to bring more capital to MFI's to make additional loans (e.g., page 14 of The Milken Institute's Project Isabela (requires registration)). The recurring theme was that "Yes, microcredit works. And it needs to reach 10 times as many people."