INTRO
MFIs participating in the initiative receive individual MFI training through » Technical Assistance and direct Advisory services, as well as » joint training sessions. This approach is aimed at ensuring the objectives of the initiatives are achieved effectively and the capacities of participating MFIs are enhanced. The Team uses a combination of CGAP and MicroSave Training Tools as well as High Standard Tools developed by seasoned consultants who have been training in Microfinance for over 10 years.
In the course of year 2011, about 30 technical interventions were delivered to partner MFIs according to the needs expressed in their capacity buildilng plans.
PLANNED TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE INTERVENTIONS
INDICATIVE LIST (2011)
Course Name: HUMAN RESOURCES REVIEW
Duration: 10 days
Beneficiary: Mamidecot (Uganda)
Targeted audience: Board of Directors, CEO and all staff
Period of intervention : October 2011
Course name: ACCOUNTING
Duration: 5 days
Beneficiary: Mamidecot (Uganda)
Targeted audience: accountants
Period of intervention: October 2011
Course name: ACTIVITY BASED COSTING
Duration: 11 days
Beneficiary: Buusaa Gonofaa (Ethiopia)
Targeted audience: Branch managers and accountants
Period of intervention: November 2011
Course name: BRANDING AND MARKETING STRATEGY
Duration: 24 days
Beneficiary: HOFOKAM (Uganda)
Targeted audience: management staff
Period of intervention: September to November 2011
Course name: PRODUCT COSTING
Duration: 11 days
Beneficiary: HOFOKAM (Uganda)
Targeted audience: branch managers and accountants
Period of intervention: November 2011
Course name: MANAGEMENT OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS (MIS) EVALUATION
Duration: 5 days
Beneficiary: IMF-Unguka (Rwanda)
Targeted audience: all staff members
Period of intervention: September 2011
Course name: ADAPTATION OF INTERNAL CONTROL, RISK MANAGEMENT AND ACCOUNTING MANUALS
Duration: 5 days
Beneficiary: BELITA (Tanzania)
Targeted audience: all staff
Period of intervention: October 2011
Course name: OWNERSHIP AND GOVERNANCE IN MICROFINANCE
Duration: 2 days
Beneficiary: MAMIDECOT (Uganda)
Targeted audience: Board Members
Period of intervention: to be determined
Course name: DEVELOPMENT OF MANUALS FOR MICROFINANCE BANK STATUS
Duration: 15 days
Beneficiary: IMF-Unguka
Targeted audience: all staff
Period of intervention: October 2011
Course name: OPERATIONAL RISK MANAGEMENT (ORM)
Duration: 3 days
Beneficiary: Wasasa, PEACE and Buusaa Gonofaa (Ethiopia)
Targeted audience: management staff
Period of intervention: to be determined, after November 2011
Course name: PRODUCT REVIEW AND ALLOCATION BASED COSTING
Duration: 5 days
Beneficiary: MAMIDECOT (Uganda)
Targeted audience: management staff
Period of intervention: to be determined, after October 2011
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to access the full list of interventions delivered to participating MFIs
JOINT TRAININGS
SAMPLE OF JOINT TRAINING SESSIONS DELIVERED IN 2010
Social Performance in Microfinance
11 – 12 November 2010; Nairobi, Kenya
The SPM training is part of the Courses being offered by the project in an effort to address capacity gaps discussed by the project and MFIs when developing their Capacity Building Plans.
Social Performance Management is a relatively new field in Microfinance, but investors, donors and practitioners are increasingly recognizing the necessity of measuring microfinance institutions’ social performance, in order to assess the achievement of the triple bottom line. Social performance management is the institutional capacity of putting mission into practice and of achieving social and development goals. It is key to understand the MFI overall achievements and avoid risk of mission drift.
Goals of the training:
• Enable participants to concretely integrate Social Performance Management into their decision-making processes and assess the alignment of MFI’s systems with social goals achievement;
• Increase knowledge of the social performance framework, its measurement and management, including generally accepted standards;
• Deepen understanding of SPM, social responsibility and consumer protection principles; participants to concretely
• Provide the participants with SPM guidelines;
• Share best practices in social performance management and measurement;
• Familiarize participants with existing social performance assessment tools and related initiatives;
• Present the social rating tool;
• Share best practices examples, Do’s and Don’ts through practical case studies;
• Initiate a first direct contact between participating MFIs and the Development Bank of Austria.
Transformation and Change Management – Culture and Leadership
4-6 October 2010 – Mombasa, Kenya
After the enactment of Microfinance Act in 2006 and the Microfinance Regulations coming into effect in May 2008, many credit only institutions expressed the will to be granted a deposit–taking Microfinance Institution (DMI) status. Having sent applications and having their names approved, many MFIs have so far realized there is a lot involved in the process of obtaining a DMI license and some recognize the fact they might not be ready to transform as quickly as intended. In that respect, Kenyan project partners have all had their names approved and are at different stages of the license granting process. The present transformation training was aimed at enlightening the MFIs on the pro’s and con’s of rushing the process of obtaining the license and the dominant questions during the discussions included, “why do you want to transform?” and “What do you want to transform to?”.
Conducted through very interactive discussions, the course sought to increase participant’s knowledge in the following areas:
• General Understanding of Origin of Microfinance – stages in the evolution of microfinance programs – from projects or NGOs to formal institutions.
• Appreciation of Challenges along the evolution path of microfinance programs.
• Understanding how strategies adopted to address challenges in (2), above affect the transformation options.
• Learning from Transformation in the East African Region: Profiling Transformation in Uganda.
• Participants to critically think through the building blocks of transformation plans for their Individual institutions.
Costing and Pricing of Financial Services
5-7 July 2010, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
The ability to quantify the costs of an MFI's activities provides a powerful tool for understanding and managing costs. Activity Based Costing (ABC) allows MFIs to cost their individual products to determine whether they are viable. Better management information on products helps managers make key decisions about product design, delivery mechanisms, and pricing. ABC is also used to cost activities and processes which will lead to a greater understanding of how and why costs are incurred. Unit costs of each activity (i.e. loan processing per application, opening a savings account per client) can be traced over time to monitor the effectiveness of streamlining measures.
The implementation of this tool can also be expanded to provide costing of branches, including unit costs of individual activities at the branch level. This information can be then used by management to benchmark performance between branches. Costing is a potent tool for identifying opportunities to improve business process effectiveness and efficiency. This course will give managers the ability to implement the ABC tool in their own institutions. It is based on CGAP’s costing tool and accompanying excel spreadsheet.
Goals of the course:
• To provide a menu of tools for allocating costs to individual microfinance products
• To introduce activity-based costing methods
• To analyze product costing data for increased efficiency
• To conduct product-level viability analysis
Financial Analysis for Microfinance Institutions
8-11 June 2010; Nairobi, Kenya
26 – 29 October 2010; Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
26-29 October 2010; Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania
The objectives of the financial analysis training course are to equip participants with the skills to format given financial statements of MFIs to appropriate formats, make the necessary adjustments and calculate and analyse the Small Enterprise Education and Promotion Network (SEEP) financial performance indicators (i.e. the ‘SEEP 18’ ratios), which are the microfinance sector’s standard indicators for analysing financial performance.
Beneficiaries are also expected to be able to effectively contribute to and utilise financial performance and benchmarking data in the Microfinance Information eXchange’s (MIX) website (www.mixmarket.org) and its journal the Micro Banking Bulletin which are the microfinance sector’s most widely used data for performance reporting and benchmarking, as well as using other similar financial performance information repositories.
The participants are expected to master the tools needed for understanding the financial position and sustainability of a financial institution, specifically:
• Identify the components, purpose, relationships, and importance of the main financial statements
• Learning the formats of income statements and balance sheets to easily separate the effects of donor funds
• Analysing financial statements to monitor profitability, efficiency, and portfolio quality
• Adjusting costs for inflation, subsidized cost of funds, and in-kind donations;
• Identifying critical factors for moving towards financial sustainability.
Business Planning
28 June – 2 July 2010; Nairobi, Kenya
13 – 17 December 2010; Tanzania
Business planning for MFIs can be understood as two closely related processes: strategic planning and operational planning. Strategic planning articulates broad institutional goals, assesses institutional performance toward achieving those goals, and selects a strategy that increases the institution’s ability to expand outreach and reach (or maintain) profitability. Operational planning creates a framework to implement the strategy, expressed concretely in a detailed financial plan. This course, Planning with Microfin, provides guidelines to help microfinance institutions prepare strategic and operational business plans and introduces participants to Microfin, a sophisticated financial projection spreadsheet. During most of this course, participants use the computer-based Microfin and a case study to develop financial projections and articulate the strategic and operational plans.
The main goal of this course is to enhance the outreach and profitability of the MFI through the development of the business plan which includes the strategic and operational plans and financial projections.
Operational Risk Management (ORM)
14 – 16 July 2010; Dar es Salaam, Tanzania
11-13 August 2010; Kampala, Uganda
22- 24 April 2010; Nairobi, Kenya
The ORM course is one of the four courses in the Operational Management Curriculum, along with ‘Business Planning’, 'Information Systems’ and ‘New Product Development’. This three day course helps microfinance institutions develop and improve the quality of their own risk management processes and focuses on problem prevention and early problem identification and control. Participants are provided with guidelines for establishing operational activities that assist an MFI to identify its vulnerabilities, design and implement controls and monitor the effectiveness of controls. Through exercises, group discussions and case studies, participants review concepts such as internal controls, fraud, and internal and external audit.
The present course aimed at improving the quality of partner MFI's riskmanagement by:
• Understanding the importance of an institutional culture of support for strong control systems
• Assessing the vulnerability of institutions to areas of risk
• Applying techniques for identifying and mitigating risks
• Monitoring the effectiveness of risk management strategies
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE
TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE SERVICES DELIVERED IN 2010
MIS support for Bimas data integrity - diagnosis & correction
15 November – 3 December 2010 – Bimas - Embu, Kenya
The purpose of this TA was to conduct diagnostic investigation and review exercise on the state of data integrity between recorded client transactions at bank, client records per the loan portfolio module and the overall portfolio reporting by the financial reporting system. Data integrity problems had to be investigated and solutions had to be determined for incorrect loan balances, overstated Interest and MIS-stated loan arrears.
By the end of the Assignment, benefitted from the following:
• Detailed Problem briefings with ICT, Operations and other key departmental stakeholders
• Recommendations based on the findings of the investigation
• Knowledge on how to reconcile the differences/identifying the cause of errors in data captured in the system and to correct them.
• Readymade documentation of non-resolvable problems to report to the System Vendor
Further advisory services were provided with respect to the following issues:
• Ensuring that BIMAS would further be able to capture data and produce up to date reports on time
• Advise BIMAS and the Vendor on how to prevent the causes of the data problems from
re-occurring in the future
• Together with MIS and Operations, discussions held on user posting issues and formulation of the best way forward.
Leadership Training for Bimas’ managers
26 – 28 November 2010 – Bimas – Embu, Kenya
The course was designed to address what the organization considered critical management and leadership related issues identified in the course of running business. The main areas covered included leadership, management, customer service and delinquency management. The TA mostly concentrated on the topics of leadership and management, while customer service and delinquency management were given lesser emphasis, though covered nonetheless. The leadership section was covered extensively and participants got to examine and evaluate themselves as part of understanding leadership.
The course specifically aimed at building capacity of participants in the following area:
• Appreciate the leadership role, the focus of the course being to project leadership from dealing with self then to be able to lead others.
• Help participants to see the role, responsibilities and challenges leading teams and managing company resources
• Examine and identify the role of leadership in delinquency management
Further information and materials can be accessed by MFIs in restricted access, using in the "Log In" section of this website.
A project implemented by the » ATC Consortium
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