Micro-finance guru unveils new vision for poor

New Delhi: Last month, 200 shanty-town dwellers in and around Nairobi - the capital of Kenya - registered for a unique micro-finance scheme. A borrower could get a loan just by punching in his or her request on a mobile phone.

Under the scheme, a borrower take a loan for a minimum of 2,000 Kenyan shillings (1,200/$26). It can even be repaid through a mobile phone, said international micro-finance guru and author Stuart Rutherford, who has been studying since the early 1970s how the poor manage their money.

"The Kenya project is still in the pilot stage. I designed the financial product and a start-up telecom firm in Nairobi is implementing it," Rutherford told IANS in an interview.

The Kenyan project "is similar to Eko, a micro-finance project launched in the Indian capital in 2009".

"Borrowers walk to the neighbourhood grocer - usually the nearest Eko agent - punch in their identification number on their cell phones and avail of loans, repay loans and even transfer money to relatives in Bihar. The local agent acts as the facilitator," the British financial analyst, who is in his 60s, said.

Rutherford, often hailed as one of the most "astute micro-finance analysts" is in India to promote his book, "Portfolios of the Poor: How the World's Poor Live on $2 a Day".

It is an in-depth examination of how the world's poorest households patch together their financial existences in South Africa, Bangladesh and India.

The book has been jointly written by Rutherford and economists Jonathon Morduch, Daryl Collins and Orlanda Ruthven.

Poor people struggle to pool large sums of money to cope with exigencies or to deal with large life-cycle expenditures like marriages, deaths and housing.

"In South Africa, marriages are cheap but funerals are expensive. When a person dies in South Africa, traditional religion requires that the dead are sent back home to the village to be buried. The relatives have to observe certain feasts on fixed days after the death," Rutherford explained.

"Weddings in India and Bangladesh tend to be expensive. Marriage is a great driver for financial behaviour in households with girls in India and Bangladesh," he said.

The financial guru also cited an interesting example.

In the informal sectors in India, you have financial tools well-designed to deal with this. In some states of southern India like Kerala and Tamil Nadu, I have come across working people's clubs - either in mosques, temples or churches - where community organisers accept tiny deposits.

"When a baby is born to a family, parents register at the community club and deposit money. They continue to do so till the child is old enough to marry and get back double the amount. A church in Kerala collects money every Sunday," Rutherford recalled.

"We need to offer better money management tools to the poor like simple savings accounts - close at hand - because one needs to capture every rupee if one is in a low income group," he said.

Rutherford, who led the non-profit organisation ActionAid in Bangladesh for several years, devised a credit and savings mechanism for at least 20,000 landless families in a remote southern district of Bangladesh.

He also established the first-ever urban replication of the Grameen Bank model, besides teaching micro-finance in the U.S., Britain and South Africa.

The architect-turned micro-finance expert decided to study money management of the poor in 1972, when he was posted in Nicaragua after a massive earthquake to rebuild poor homes.

"My job took me to the slums and working class homes. I became aware of the different and the sophisticated ways in which the locals managed their money. Poor people, I realised, had a very active financial life contrary to popular perceptions. I took up studying micro-finance as a hobby," he said.
Source: IANS