Conference assesses changing face of microfinance

While 50 dollars won’t come close to covering next semester’s Calculus book, through the right channels it can help an entire village climb out of poverty.

Students, academics and professionals met Saturday in Huntsman Hall to discuss the changing model of microfinance as part of a conference put on by the Penn Microfinance Club.

Now in its fifth year, the Penn Microfinance Club was formed to create productive discussion on microfinance in order to promote activism and change.

The club has grown dramatically since it was founded in 2007 and now puts on workshops, holds conferences and even sponsors six student-run teams to travel abroad during the summer acting as semi-consultants to microfinance organizations.

This weekend’s conference, entitled The New Face of Microfinance, consisted of several panels and two keynote speakers. The panels featured members of companies including JP Morgan, Citi Foundation, Argo Group and the World Bank. Asad Mahmood, managing director of Global Social Investment Funds at Deutsche Bank, and Gina Harman, president and chief executive officer of Accion Network, gave the conference’s keynote addresses.

According to Co-Chairwoman of the Penn Microfinance Club Ashima Sukhdev, a College junior, the conference focused on the new controversies and challenges that are arising in the Microfinance Model. For example, there has been a dramatic rise in suicide rates for microloan recipients recently that has cast a negative shadow over the microfinance model.

“People have been getting a bit jaded with microfinance lately, and we need to look at the model to examine why there are increased pressures,” she said. “It now needs to adapt to the fact that microfinance has grown so much as a field. It’s sort of like growing pains for the sector as it gets bigger.”

Those who attended the conference found the issues raised by speakers to be thought-provoking. Mustufa Eran, a graduate student at the School of Design, liked that the sessions looked at microfinance from a global perspective. “It’s good to know what’s happening around the world and how the field is changing” Eran said. “The speakers had an interesting and diverse background, and it was good getting exposure to the issues from different angles”.

College sophomore Chloe Roldan was glad that the speakers delved into the more controversial topics of microfinance. “The discussions about profiting from the poor and whether there were actual long-term benefits to microfinance made the conference worth going to,” she said.

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