Grameen Foundation : What we do
What we do
Microfinance - a powerful poverty-fighting tool: Microfinance helps people to escape poverty by giving them collateral-free loans and other financial services to support income-generating businesses. As each loan is repaid, the money is redistributed as loans to others, thereby mulitiplying its impact. For Fatima, a FONDEP client in Morocco, the loans have helped her build a business and new horizons for her children.
Bold thinking and new ideas are critical if we are to win the fight against global poverty. Grameen Foundation is a leader in advancing innovative solutions to make microfinance and technology work better and help more people escape the cycle of poverty.
Using microfinance and technology, we work with local poverty-focused organizations and global allies to help them reach and serve more of the world's poor people more effectively. Our goal is to use our resources, knowledge and innovations to identify large scale solutions and strategies that really do move people out of poverty, and then share that knowledge widely. Our work focuses on six key areas:
Connecting microfinance institutions with capital markets
With more than 400 million poor people cut off from financial services, there is a huge, unmet need for microfinance. To reach them, MFIs need capital beyond the traditional philanthropic support to rapidly expand their operations and increase outreach. Our Capital Management and Advisory Center is harnessing the vast resources of local and international capital markets to bring new financial resources to our microfinance institution partners.
Strengthening organizations by building people practices
Our Human Capital Center focuses on helping MFIs and other poverty and development-focused organizations strengthen their capacity for attracting, developing and retaining talented staff. Like other rapidly growing businesses, these organizations need talented, dedicated staff at all levels—entry, mid, and senior—to help them achieve their mission. Our vision is to help organizations align their human capital management practices with their overall business strategy, which will allow them to better maximize their employees’ skills, achieve more sustainable growth and reach more people.
Harnessing the power of technology
Our Grameen Technology Center is the leader in information and communications technology (ICT) initiatives for the microfinance and international development communities. It spearheads our industry-changing innovations that increase the efficiency of MFI’s operations, create new microbusiness opportunities for the poor, provide telecommunications access for the world's rural poor, and improve their access to health and agriculture information and other services, and connect remote communities.
Helping track people’s movement out of poverty
Our Social Performance Management Center helps MFIs measure and manage their client’s movement out of poverty. MFIs must show results, yet many do not have the tools to evaluate how well they are fulfilling their mission of reducing poverty, reaching people excluded from financial services, empowering women, or promoting community solidarity. Our Progress out of Poverty Index™ is designed to fill that need.
Sharing knowledge widely for broader impact
New ideas and innovative thinking will drive the expansion and effectiveness of microfinance. Knowledge sharing is an important component of our work. To have the greatest impact on global poverty, we are committed to sharing ideas and innovations with the wider microfinance community. We hope this "open-sourcing" of information will guide other organizations in improving the industry's outreach to the more than one billion people living in abject poverty. You can learn more and share your thoughts on our blog.
Social Business
In January 2008, Nobel Laureate Muhammad Yunus introduced a new term to the business lexicon: social business. Writing in his new book, Creating a World without Poverty, Yunus laid out the framework for two social business models and urged others to adopt them in the fight against global poverty. A social business is social-objective driven. In the first model, the company’s mission is achieved through creating or supporting sustainable "non-loss" business enterprises where all of the profits are ploughed back into the company rather than being distributed to shareholders. The second social business model is one which is profit-driven, but owned and operated entirely by the poor, who receive all company profits.
Grameen Capital India and Grameen-Jameel Pan Arab Microfinance Limited are two social businesses that have already been launched with the support of Grameen Foundation.
Grameen Foundation : What we do
Grameen Foundation uses microfinance and innovative technology to fight global poverty and bring opportunities to the world's poorest people. With tiny loans and financial services, we help the poor, mostly women, start businesses and escape poverty. Our global network of 55 microfinance institution (MFI) partners including our Growth Guarantee partners has touched more than 34 million people in 24 countries. In addition, we introduced and now sustain technology initiatives (Mifos and Village Phone) in Cameroon, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, bringing our total country outreach to 28.
+1-202-628-3560 www.grameenfoundation.org
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