2011 – A Record-Setting Year for FINCA!

FINCA Tanzania Village Bank Group

FINCA Kyrgyzstan Clients

FINCA Reaches 900,000 client milestone!

FINCA reached a major new milestone in December 2011 by surpassing the 900,000-client mark for the first time in the organization's history. Given the five-person average family size of our clients, FINCA's financial services potentially improved the lives of over four and a half million children and adults struggling in poverty.

• Thanks to particularly rapid growth in Democratic Republic of Congo and Tanzania, FINCA’s five programs in Africa combined to surpass 200,000 clients served for the first time since FINCA entered the region in 1992. At the end of November, the Africa region was serving a total of 246,033 clients, with an average loan size of just $341. FINCA’s financial services are potentially touching the lives of 1.2 million African children and adults.
  
• Similarly, FINCA’s seven Eurasian programs, stretching over 5,000 miles from Kosovo to Siberia, reached just shy of 360,000 clients through November, with strong growth, particularly in both Azerbaijan and Kyrgyzstan. FINCA’s small loans are impacting as many as 1.8 million people.
  
• FINCA Mexico, the largest program in the FINCA network, has grown its outreach by 16% in 2011. Currently serving 144,620 clients—92% of them women—throughout the country, it is likely to be the first FINCA program to surpass the 150,000-client mark by early 2012.

Read more about FINCA Microfinance Outreach here >>

Savings Programs

Our innovative savings programs in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ecuador and Uganda have proved to be extremely popular. In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, FINCA clients, who had just 300 savings accounts in 2009, have opened more than 128,000 accounts and saved more than $10 million in 2011. This means that on average, each client now has $78 in a savings account that can be used as a safety net in case of emergency.

Worldwide, the results are also impressive as FINCA clients in eight countries have accumulated savings deposits of $38.5 million to invest in their businesses, their children’s education, and raising their living standards, with improved nutrition, housing, healthcare and sanitation.

StarGirls in Uganda

In many districts of Uganda, the rate of girls’ enrollment in school remains less than 50 percent. Parents blame the high costs of school fees, books and supplies for choosing to educate their sons over their daughters. Here as in other developing countries, girls from poor families who drop out of school often have to work in the fields or in their parents’ businesses to help support their families. Many face a lifetime of poverty.

But 1,300 Ugandan girls as young as 10, who save their allowances or earn money by fetching water or doing chores, can now save this money safely and responsibly through our unique program, StarGirls, helping to ensure they can afford the education they need for a brighter future. Read more abour StarGirls here >>

Islamic Financing

In Afghanistan and Jordan, where traditional interest-bearing loans are not culturally acceptable, FINCA offers clients the ability to receive financing that complies with Islamic tenets and has been approved by local religious leaders. FINCA now serves 24,100 clients in Afghanistan and Jordan, where we are proud to say that, despite all the challenges of working in Afghanistan, our portfolio at risk in both countries remains below 0.5%. In other words, an impressive 99.5% of loans are repaid on time.

Technology Advantages

Around the world, FINCA is using technology – handheld computers, point of sale (POS) terminals, debit cards, etc. – to make it easier, safer and cheaper for clients to bank with us. Thousands of clients in Mexico, for example, save time and money every day by using prepaid cards to access their loans through ATMs and POS terminals throughout the country.

Read more about FINCA Mexico's pre-paid cards project >>

FINCA Programs' Honors

• FINCA’s programs in Ecuador and Mexico were ranked in the Top 100 by Microfinance Americas, a publication of the Multilateral Investment Fund of the Inter-American Development Bank and the Microfinance Information Exchange (Mix), for their outstanding outreach, transparency and efficiency.
  
• FINCA’s programs in Azerbaijan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Jordan, Russia and Tajikistan were all honored with the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor’s (CGAP) Social Performance Reporting awards for their commitment to transparency and accountability in reporting about the direct impact on poor clients of their work.

Smart Microfinance Campaign

FINCA and other leading microfinance institutions (MFI) worldwide have drafted and endorsed a statement in support of the Smart Microfinance Campaign, a core set of client protection principles to help MFIs practice good ethics and smart business. These include: transparent and responsible pricing, avoidance of over-indebtedness, appropriate collections practices, ethical staff behavior, mechanisms for redress of grievances, and privacy of client data.

This is nothing new for FINCA. Since our founding in 1985, we’ve been dedicated to safeguarding the interests of our clients through fair practices and strict policies. We’ve long been a leader in the industry in promoting the adoption of these initiatives. Underscoring our commitment to the principles of the Smart Campaign, FINCA's President & CEO serves as a founding member of its Steering Committee.

Read more about the Smart Campaign >>

Microfinance CEO Working Group

To address a number of challenges facing the microfinance industry which have lead to critical media coverage over the last year, FINCA's President & CEO Rupert Scofield came together with a group of his peers to form the Microfinance CEO Working Group (MCWG). After several months of meetings, the MCWG has agreed that the appropriate responses to these challenges include strong consumer protection, meaningful transparency and development of industry standards of social performance management and measurement.

To these ends, the MCWG will support the Smart Campaign and two other ongoing industry initiatives to promote transparent pricing and to develop common tools for measuring social performance and mission fulfillment. FINCA will continue to be a leader in this initiative.

Read more about the Microfinance CEO Working Group >>

FINCA Microfinance Holdings, LLC

Lastly, we launched a socially-responsible investment partnership for microfinance called FINCA Microfinance Holdings, LLC (FMH). By partnering with some of the world’s leading international development banks and socially-responsible investment firms, we will be able to offer our current clients a wide range of new financial services and to reach many more of the 1.4 billion people living in poverty who lack access to financial services. FMH will also lead to efficiencies in the provision of these services, enabling us to pass on cost savings to our clients.