microfinance

The day is almost here!

Come visit Lumana at one of the final home games of the Seattle Storm basketball season! We'll be presenting on the court, delivering our message, and have volunteers sharing our story and accepting donations at locations around the stadium.

By purchasing your ticket from the link below, receive 50% off the gate price, and $5 from the proceeds will go directly towards a Lumana loan or a loan increase for successful, under-served entrepreneurs in West Ghana.

Purchase tickets by using these 6 simple steps:

Each fellow has been working intently at his/her respective projects since our last update. Coming from many different backgrounds (collectively, we are studying accounting, entrepreneurship, international business, political science, economics, and international studies), we each have settled into specialized projects that will improve Lumana’s operations from many angles.

So far, Blake Strickland has been in charge of streamlining Mifos (a powerful tool that’s specifically designed for MFOs) so that the data we collect will be able to be put in a centralized database, which will allow for faster data input and quicker statistical calculations. In addition to Mifos, Blake has also been helping direct and oversee the business courses that Lumana offers to all incoming clients.

Mieka Briejer has been focusing mainly on creating updated versions of the class content and coordinating with Victor about covering all of the new content. The updated business classes span for two weeks instead of three. Not only does the new class schedule allow our clients to return to their business an entire week quicker, it also maintains all of the key concepts from the previous class schedule.

David Almeida has been working on a new business readiness survey. The new version of the survey is given to every new loan applicant. It allows us to learn about the well-being of our clients and to gauge their ability to utilize a loan. David has also been interviewing farmers in the Volta region. One thing that David mentioned is that although much of the soil here is relatively sandy, farmers are able to yield a very high number of tomatoes (along with other vegetables).

Xiaohan Zhang been devising an improved process of data collection to allow for better insight about the effects of Lumana’s loans on our clients. So far, he has been collecting PPI scores and detailed business information from current clients, new clients (those who are in the business training classes but have not received loans), and non-clients (those who have been approved, but not yet worked into our classes).

In addition to our individual projects, we have all been getting our hands dirty job shadowing several clients to gain an in depth view of how our clients run their businesses. Oh, and we were serious about the “getting our hands dirty” part…

While each of us has been working hard at our individual projects, we could not have done any of it without the help of our Ghanaian friends Victor and Kizito. They have been with us throughout the entire process by helping translate and providing insight about improvements to be made.

What kind of people does Lumana have on the ground in Ghana?

Meet Blake Strickland: a trombone-playing, sustainable consulting, UW business school student.

Blake is a junior in the Foster School of Business at the University of Washington studying Accounting and Information Systems. How did he get involved in Lumana? It actually began in Panama.

Blake coordinated a Global Business Brigade to Panama last spring break for 29 UW students where they provided sustainable consulting for a farm there. The final result of their work was increasing the farmers’ capacity to sell chickens and goats by over 300%! This experience ignited a passion for social entrepreneurship, and after meeting David Almeida, another Lumana fellow, he learned about the opportunity to be involved with microfinance in Ghana this summer. With the help of friends and family, Blake was able to raise enough support to travel and Ghana to sacrifice his time and resources to serve the villages there.

While in Ghana, Blake’s first project with the fellows is mapping the Atorkor village with Google phone technology to get a better perspective of our clients’ location within the community. He’ll also be helping transition our system into MIFOS software for our client database which will allow us to organize and better manage demographic information.

Although Blake considered bringing his trombone to Ghana, he decided it was probably better to leave it at home and will continue playing in the UW jazz band when he returns. He's also an active member of the Chi Psi Fraternity, and is excited to cheer on Ghana (and the U.S.) in the World Cup! Lumana is glad to have him.

This past Sunday, Muhammad Yunus came to Seattle to give a lecture on his new book, Building Social Business. I have heard Yunus speak before, but this time, instead of microfinance, he was touring the US to promote his new book. I'm sure he signed a lot of copies!

Amazingly large tracts of Africa have already been oriented towards farming through centuries of tradition. As a result, there is potential for Africa to serve as the bread basket for the world. However, many issues are currently preventing this from happening. Arid land, poor seed varieties, overuse of slash and burn methods for farming, and a lack of access to sustainable irrigation are just some of the impediments holding back the rural African farmer. But there are many technologies that are both affordable and appropriate to solving these problems: they just need to be made accessible.

At Lumana, we have offered savings accounts as an integral part of our lending program since we started our pilot project in 2008.

Microfinance has a lot of different outcomes. First of all, there are the 'escape from poverty, empower yourself, send all your children to school, invest in your business, create jobs, access quality healthcare' outcomes. These are the huge, best-case outcomes, and also what microfinance advocates usually preach. Then there come the smaller outcomes, such as ONE rural villager sending their child to school, or ONE person being able to expand their business based on a micro-loan.

In this post I would like to introduce our community of donors, collaborators and general enthusiasts to our technology partners Literacy Bridge

Literacy Bridge is an organization started by ex software consultant and current technology for development enthusiast Cliff Schmidt. After spending just six weeks in Ghana Cliff decided that access to knowledge for the rural poor was something that could be accommodated by basic technology, it just needed to be invented.

Picture this scenario:

A conference entitled 'Monitoring, Evaluation, and Social Impact' is in full swing in a lovely hotel room in downtown New York. A plenary speaker is addressing a room full of donors, investors, practitioners, communication specialists about global development and the need for transparency and results.

Then, the inevitable question comes up: “What results?…do we have any to communicate?”

Welcome to the Lumana agriculture Blog. Every Tuesday I will be bringing you information about farming in Africa as well as stories from around the world. My biggest interest is how farmers in the villages we work in (as well as other parts of the developing world) access information about agriculture, employ new tactics to improve their crops and learn ways to guarantee their families food security by using smart storage and planning techniques.