Three Weeks In And What Do You Get, Another Day Older And Deeper in Debt

This is my 3rd week at the Grameen Foundation & considering I'm only here 4 months, it's already time to take stock of whether anything has been done!

If you take a look around the temp office I'm in, you'd think not much is going on. There's a bottle of water, a laptop, monitor, mouse, telephone, franklin planner, clean pad of paper, and an article entitled Is It fair to do Business with the poor? Basically, sans the franklin, it looks like I haven't done a thing. But I swear, I have been working! If someone had asked me for a status report, here's what I would have said:

• Drafted a presentation on the effectiveness of Safe Harbor as a travel agency for Grameen
• Trained Fonkoze Social Impact Monitor supervisers on some basic Excel techniques
• Enhanced Excel data collection for Fonkoze's social performance management to include data validation for all fields and error messaging
• Reviewed the requirements and user stories documentation for the poverty index software tool
• Assisted with documenting the job posting 4 the Programmer Analyst position for this project
• Document the take-on process for a volunteer at Grameen & share with the new Bankers without Borders program

There was a lot of the "soft stuff" too. Like coming to speed on what the hell is a PPI and being able to articulate it with some semblance of understanding. Figuring out how to get things accomplished in this office (e.g., where's the kitchen, how do I get something mailed, how can I get access to the timekeeping system). And convincing the building superintendent, with the great support from Denise, that it would be worth the effort to provide me with an id card so I don't have to bug security every morning. Not to mention all of the acronyms that I have had to learn like

• Grameen Foundation ('GF')
• Microfinance Institution ('MFI')
• Progress Out Of Poverty Index ('PPI')
• Social Performance Management ('SPM')

Not too shabby for a couple weeks of work, but as always, I'm slightly disappointed with works in progress that are not complete. For instance, I wish that the

• Travel Project Discussion Deck would be closer to finalization. Instead, I'll be speaking with their outsourced travel agency to get travel stats and tracking down expense reports from the finance dept for the rest of the data
• As-Is Process for Fonkoze SPM Tool had already been documented and sent for review to Leah and Scott. Instead, I've been poking around GF for a day to find if there are any documentation standards that they use with their microfinance partners, in an attempt to encourage standardization.

Despite being only 13 days into this assignment, I'm already putting a fire under my ass because I know there are other projects on the horizon that I'd love to get involved with

• Human Capital Center: This is an initiative to explore how microfinance institutions can build upon HR best practices to ensure the right people are being leveraged & trained at these MFIs; especially those working with the "forgotten bottom" (aka, the poor people that poor people feel sorry for)
• Marketing: All I know about this project is that it involves photos, a website, working with Kay, and already I am sold.
• Opening New Offices: GF is decentralizing and thereore opening new offices in Jakarta, Manila, and Hong Kong. To assist, I've already reached out to folks that I know at Capital on this project, done research on various website on standards for opening new offices. But more than anything, I would love to have something tangible to walk in to Michael's office and say "look what I've found!"

Despite wanting to have a stack of deliverables to point to -- it's well past the end the day & I'm still in the office. I'm not completing the presentation or documenting the as-is process. Instead, I'm reading whether MFIs are taking advantage of the poor. I'm reading about MFIs that are providing loans at 3% interest a month, which can translate to a 36% interest rate per year. And then comparing that to a tradition in the Phillipines called 'Five and Six' -- where in the morning a person borrows 500 pesos and pays back 600 pesos in the evening. That's a 20% interest rate per day. So, as I sit back and think about what is fair to the poor, I realize that it is more about:

1. giving them a rate that is better than what they have today,
2. establishing a rate that will keep the institution, that is loaning the money, sustainable (because really, what good is it in the long run to give out loans if the institution lending fails),
3. creating a mentality where the poor see viable way out of poverty for themselves and their children

Despite the fact that no deliverable is being created in this moment, the learning is still powerful. I am comprehending how this PPI measurement can be a first step in proving to an organization that their clients are moving out of poverty. My eyes are opening to the global regulatory bodies that may one day demand this social performance data from institutions, and thereby reminding myself that whatever software tool gets developed for these MFIs, it damn well better be flexible enough to meet those future regulatory requirements. Certainly this was a good use of my evening.

Reality Check: Natural disaster is an ever present threat to the poor; this threat of devastation goes beyond our American images disaster. When a flood, typhoon, hurricane, cyclone, landslide, or tornado hits a family in poverty there is no "unemployment insurance," "disaster recovery plan," "emergency evacuation" or any other safety net to which we are familar in the US. Even with the grand failures like FEMA with Katrina, there are many in the world who would be so lucky that an agency could ignore them for a period of time. In a previous blog, I spoke of the Haitian woman who now effectively lives at the bottom of a riverbed. Without microfinance organizations like Fonkoze, she would continue to have no food, no shelter, and no means for getting herself and her family, back onto their feet. Thus, it is my belief that I'd rather have an industry filled with MFIs that are stumbling to try to make things better, than to be rash and attempt to resrtucture them completely. Consider this -- the poverty indicators in this region of Haiti are measured by whether she has a tin roof, eats 3 meals a day, and if her kids are in school -- in other regions the first question is: Does the person have at least one piece of clothing that she or he can wear? Imagine that sort of devastation for a moment.

... yes, there was a lot of name dropping in this blog, but how else am I supposed to remember everyone's name!