Microfinance: One industry, multiple methods

By Rob Packer, KF10 Colombia

Microfinance is commonly seen as the exclusive territory of non-profits and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). While there are a lot of non-profits on the Kiva platform, there is also a fair number of for-profit MFIs and additionally, a lot of the non-Kiva money coming into microfinance is returns-driven (i.e. investment for profit). Whether it’s interest charged on a loan from a bank, the spread required for philanthropic financing by national or supranational governments, or the more apparent return sought by microfinance investment firms, there is an implicit profit motive in microfinance that touches all areas of the industry. Does a for-profit MFI with a strong social mission automatically cause lower levels of development because the ultimate aim of the company is profit? As is always the case in microfinance, the answer is “it depends”, but from my experience in Kyrgyzstan, I don’t see that microfinance and for-profit are mutually exclusive. In all the discussion of whether for-profit or non-profit organizations are better, there is an important point that is often overlooked. The main struggle for an MFI is not how much of a profit they make, but whether they break even.

I’ve now spent two weeks with my new MFI, Barranquilla-based Fundación Mario Santo Domingo (FMSD), which is also Kiva’s first field partner in Colombia. The difference in temperature and ambience between the cold of Kyrgyzstan and the warmth of Colombia’s Caribbean coast is obvious enough, but the differences between these two MFI’s as institutions are almost equally as astounding. While Mol Bulak Finance is a for-profit institution working mainly with women in group loans, FMSD is a philanthropic foundation started by the Santo Domingo family, one of Colombia’s richest, with a microfinance department that lends primarily to individuals in the urban areas of Barranquilla, Cartagena and Bogotá. And while a large number of Kiva’s field partners have been in existence for less than a decade, FMSD will be celebrating its fiftieth year in 2010, although it hasn’t included a microfinance unit for all that time.

From what I’ve seen over the past week, FMSD inspires an incredible amount of loyalty from its staff, a lot of whom have been with FMSD for around twenty years—a rarity in the microfinance industry. You can find a similar loyalty in terms of the clients: on a visit to meet borrowers this week, we met some who have been clients of FMSD for up to ten or fifteen years and I’ve met other borrowers who have now been registered as businesses in Barranquilla’s chamber of commerce. It’s hard not to be impressed. At the same time, FMSD run a wide range of free vocational training programmes: while I was waiting for the bus with my Kiva Coordinator last week, a passer-by stopped to say hello to FMSD’s Kiva Coordinator—he’d taken a course as a baker at FMSD and now had a job as a baker around the corner from the Foundation. Perhaps one of the most impressive parts of FMSD’s work was part of the same visit to entrepreneurs when afterwards we went to Villas San Pablo, a housing community being built on the outskirts of Barranquilla with assistance from a number of international organizations, such as the Inter-American Development Bank, as well as the Colombian government. The scale and vision of the project is impressive: to construct a community of 20,000 homes to allow the poor from all over the department of Atlántico to have their own home for the first time. A visit to the site at the moment is a strange experience as it’s still under construction: there are lots of vacant lots and a few streets of single-storey buildings with the sound of reggaeton from a lot of the houses. The majority of the inhabitants are people who aren’t able to move out of their parents’ home for financial reasons, people who are living in rented accommodation or people from other parts of Colombia displaced by the armed conflict that needs no introduction. The houses are built with a joint loan between FMSD and the Colombian government and have been designed to be constructed using a modular method: each room of the house can be built separately depending on the family’s resources. It’s going to be interesting to see how it progresses.

It looks like it’s going to be an interesting few months and I’m looking forward to working with Kiva’s first partner in Colombia. And with the tradition of story-telling on Colombia’s Caribbean coast ranging from Barranquilla humour past the bawdy letanías of Barranquilla’s Carnival to the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez, I can already tell that meeting the borrowers is going to be a highlight of my time here.

Welcome to the Kiva family, Colombia!

Rob Packer is a Kiva Fellow currently working with the Fundación Mario Santo Domingo in Barranquilla, Colombia. There are borrowers from Colombia with FMSD who you can help by contributing to a loan today, and many other entrepreneurs from around the world on the Kiva site.

/>