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Posts Tagged ‘Cambodia’

Rural Market Failure — Shareholder Rights

Posted in The village, Village institutions, tagged , , , , , on February 1, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Saving at home is convenient, private and predator-free.

In a study of 301 households that belonged to village financial institutions (VFIs) in 37 villages in Cambodia, my team from the Canadian Co-operative Association asked what would cause them to deposit more savings? By far the strongest response was: “the managers must show more respect for the rules.” (Towards Safety & Self-Reliance, p. 51.)

The rules to which they referred were not complex: they expected the managers to refrain from (more…)

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The Road ‘Less Traveled’

Posted in Financial cooperatives, History, Microfinance, tagged , , , , , , , on May 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood,
and I, I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
— Robert Frost

Some three decades ago the experts announced that only one source of funds could deliver microfinance services sustainably to billions of the world’s poorest people. That source was Western capital markets and the profit-maximizing investors participating in them.

When F.W. Raiffeisen launched the first microfinance revolution (1864-1945) he used a different source of funds: (more…)

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Why Study Village Finance?

Posted in Financial cooperatives, Microfinance, tagged , , , , , , on May 21, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Field portion, village finance auditing course, Cambodia, 2007

About 8 years ago I visited a small credit cooperative in Cambodia. Its chairman was a cheerful farmer with greying hair and callouses who wore neat business clothes with a krama (a square checked Khmer cloth) flung jauntily over his shoulder. He presented a sheaf of neat hand-written financials to me, with his signature and the treasurer’s jumping boldly off the bottom.

As we visited borrowers (more…)

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Our ‘global village’?

Posted in The village, tagged , , , , , on April 17, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Quietly watching us.

Imagine if, each morning as you pulled out of your driveway, you were touched by the gaze of the same child, watching you from the sidewalk. Her gaze is as open and undemanding as the earth, and as curious and deeply conscious as any you’ve received from your own children. She is also visibly poverty-stricken.

I took this photo while visiting a small village bank in Cambodia. Whenever foreigners enter a village there, curious children gather to watch. These two stood quietly on the fringe of my meetings with the village adults for over an hour. (more…)

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