I.0 ABSTRACT..................................................................................................22.0 INTRODUCTION..........................................................................................3

Definition of Rural Finance..............................................................................33.0 GENERAL EXPERIENCE WITH RURAL FINANCE....................................4

The African Experience...................................................................................5Explanations for the Poor Performance...........................................................6Recent Reforms...............................................................................................7

4.0. ADB’s RURAL FINANCE ACTIVITIES.....................................................8Traditional Objectives and Evaluation.............................................................9Lessons Learned...........................................................................................10

5.0. SWITCH IN PARADIGMS......................................................................11Comparison of The Old and New Paradigms in Rural Finance.....................11Subsidized Credit and Poverty Alleviation.....................................................13Subsidized Credit and Production.................................................................17

6.0. MARKETING NICHES............................................................................18Three Potential Niches..................................................................................19

7.0. GUIDELINES FOR DESIGNING RURAL FINANCE PROJECTS..........19Necessary Preconditions...............................................................................20Crowding Out.................................................................................................21Sector Studies...............................................................................................22Transaction Costs..........................................................................................23Interest Rate Policies.....................................................................................24Short-term Subsidies.....................................................................................25Loan Guarantee Schemes.............................................................................25Deposit Mobilization.......................................................................................25Prudential Regulation....................................................................................28Evaluation......................................................................................................30Sustainability Measures.................................................................................31Outreach........................................................................................................34Synopsis of Guidelines..................................................................................35

BIBLIOGRAPHY................................................................................................37APPENDICES...................................................................................................43

Appendix Number 1: CREDIT-IMPACT STUDIES.......................................43Appendix Number 2: TRANSACTION COSTS..............................................45Appendix Number 3: MARKET RATES OF INTEREST...............................49Appendix Number 4: LOAN GUARANTEE PROGRAMS..............................50Appendix Number 5: THE SUBSIDY DEPENDENCY INDEX........................53Appendix Number 6: SUGGESTED STEPS FOR IMPLEMENTING.............55THE NEW PARADIGM..................................................................................55Appendix Number 7: SOURCES OF INFORMATION ON MICROFINANCE 60

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POLICY GUIDELINES FOR THERURAL FINANCIAL SUB-SECTOR

I.0 ABSTRACT

1.1 The 1999 vision statement of the African Development Bank (ADB) emphasized poverty reduction as its primary goal. Achieving this goal requires the bank to expand the scope of its development assistance in rural finance beyond the traditional agricultural lines of credit to employ a new paradigm in its rural finance programs: a paradigm that concentrates more directly on poverty alleviation. The new paradigm focuses more attention on building efficient, sustainable, and subsidy-independent financial infrastructure that provides deposit and lending services to people of modest means. Appropriate infrastructure might include rural branches of banks that mobilize deposits, reformed postal saving systems that handle deposits, savings and credit unions that both lend and mobilize funds, and non-governmental organizations that specialize in micro-lending.

1.2 In the past, the ADB lent large amounts of money through lines of credit and through credit components in rural development projects that were managed mostly by government-controlled agricultural development banks. The results of these efforts in: (a) boosting agricultural development, (b) reducing poverty, and (c) in building efficient financial infrastructure were rather disappointing. It is only in the late 1990s that the Bank begun to experiment with lending to non-traditional financial institutions that specialize in microfinance. Experience in other regions of the world suggests that microfinance can be done successfully using a new paradigm.

1.3 This paper provides general policy guidelines for designing microfinance projects and also identifies supplemental sources of information that might be useful in this process. The guidelines include, inter alia, the necessary preconditions in the project area for a successful take-off of a rural finance project, determining whether crowding out is a problem, and possibly conducting sub-sector studies to supply the requisite background information for project design. Some of the issues that must be considered in project design include reducing transaction costs, establishing proper interest rate policies, managing short-term subsidies, and avoiding loan guarantee schemes. Where deposit mobilization is a major part of the project, attractive deposit products must be designed and prudential regulation strengthened. The objectives of these new projects should be to build and strengthen financial infrastructure that can provide financial services on a sustainable basis to large numbers of poor people in rural areas. Carefully designed projects should clearly state these objectives and specify how the results will be measured.

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2.0 INTRODUCTION

2.1 Although they are often under-emphasized in development programs, rural areas are important in most developing countries because they produce basic necessities such as food and fiber and provide markets for goods produced in urban centers. From a social perspective the rural areas are even more important because of the large number of poor people who eke out livelihoods there.1 In the past, credit programs were mostly aimed at boosting agricultural production and investments. Recently, development practitioners have increasingly refocused finance programs on reducing poverty.

2.2 The 1999 Vision Statement of the African Development Bank called for the bank to make similar changes by concentrating on poverty alleviation. In the section on agriculture and rural development it states that: “…the Bank would facilitate rural financial intermediation by supporting bottom-up, demand driven, micro and rural finance schemes aimed at assisting the poor and vulnerable groups of society” (p. 10). Past ADB practices in agricultural credit are largely inconsistent with this new objective because relatively little of the lines of credit funded by ADB has reached the poor. The Bank, therefore, must make major adjustments in the way it designs and evaluates rural finance projects to accomplish this new objective. These adjustments ought to be consistent with the new dominant development model that relies mostly on market forces to guide development, instead of central planning and directed credit. Making these adjustments will necessitate a fundamental switch in the basic paradigm used to design rural finance projects.

2.3 This paper is a follow up to two other ADB policy publications [see African Development Bank, “Agriculture and Rural Development Sector Bank Group Policy (2000)”: and African Development Bank, “Bank Group Financial Sector Policy (2001)]”. It also takes account of the preliminary findings of the ongoing study on Development Finance Institutions (DFIs). It provides guidelines on ways to develop microfinance programs to more directly address poverty in rural areas, a problem highlighted in the Agricultural and Rural Development Policy paper. It also augments and supplements the discussion of microfinance introduced in the more general Financial Sector paper. This paper provides guidelines on how to expand and improve the sub-sector of the financial system that operates in rural areas, in ways that will more directly benefit poor people -- through microfinance programs in the rural areas.

Definition of Rural Finance

2.4 Rural finance is a relatively new term used to describe the portion of the financial system that supplies financial services and financial products outside urban areas.

1 About half of the 600 million people who live south of the Sahara are embraced by poverty and the bulk of the poorest-of-the poor live in rural areas.

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It includes traditional agricultural credit to small holder farmers, formal and semi-formal loans made to non-farm businesses in rural areas, various forms of informal finance in small towns and villages, and formal deposit-taking from rural clients.2 The use of the term “rural finance” results from an evolution in development thinking. Previous concerns with producing more food through agricultural credit programs have evolved to broader concerns about lessening poverty, boosting employment, treating women more fairly, and using financial markets more effectively to support development.

3.0 GENERAL EXPERIENCE WITH RURAL FINANCE

3.1 Rural financial intermediation is problematic everywhere. The small size of the typical transaction, both loans and deposits, the dispersion of potential clients, the risks associated with farming, and the lack of bankable land documents result in rural finance being both costly and risky; it is the most difficult activity that financial markets undertake. It is not surprising, therefore, that most governments and many donors gave ample attention to expanding agricultural credit for several decades after World War II. In numerous countries, Mexico and the Philippines, for example, large increases in the volume of directed credit -- often provided through government-owned banks -- were the main instruments used to promote agricultural development during the 1960s and 1970s.

3.2 Donors supported these efforts with hundreds of agricultural credit projects. Starting in the 1970s, however, these activities were seen to produce increasingly unsatisfactory results. The effects of credit projects on agricultural production were ambiguous; loan recovery problems were chronic; the purchasing power of many agricultural credit portfolios were eroded by inflation; poor people received few of the subsidies associated with these programs; and many of the development banks administering these efforts collapsed.3 These disappointing results caused donors such as the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and the Inter-American Development Bank to reduce sharply in the 1980s their agricultural credit efforts and to refocus attention on helping poor people in new ways that were more consistent with a new paradigm on rural finance (see Section V).

2 The term formal finance here refers to the portion of the financial system that is supervised by a central monetary authority. Semi-formal finance is provided by organizations that are officially recognized or permitted to offer financial services, but which are not systematically supervised by a central monetary authority. This includes financial activities in co-operatives, loans made by non-governmental organizations, and licensed pawnbrokers. Informal finance includes all other forms of finance that occur without official supervision or permission: e.g., moneylenders, self-help financial groups, and merchant and dealer lending.3 The first comprehensive evaluation of these efforts was done by the U.S. Agency for International Development in 1972-73 in its Spring Review of Small Farmer Credit Programs (Donald). This was followed by a Colloquium on Rural Finance in Low-Income Countries held in Washington, D.C. in 1981. The World Bank and the Agency for International Development sponsored the Colloquium where the results of directed credit programs were criticized (Adams, Graham, and Von Pischke). Later, both the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank issued policy papers on finance that led both banks to abandon gradually most directed credit efforts.

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3.3 During the 1980s and 1990s a number of specialized agricultural development banks were liquidated or merged with other banks. Some development banks shrank substantially in size but continued to operate without much donor support. In only a few cases, Indonesia and Malaysia being prime examples, were agricultural development banks successfully reformed along lines that were consistent with a new paradigm. Increasingly, donors shifted away from agricultural credit and supported the microlending provided mainly by non-governmental agencies (NGOs). At the same time, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund helped to provide more hospitable environments for all finance projects through structural adjustment programs.

The African Experience

3.4 Agricultural credit efforts in Africa have been even more problematic than similar activities elsewhere. This is a conundrum. On the one hand, informal finance in Africa provides sustained and subsidy-free financial services -- both loans and deposits -- to large numbers of rural people. Research suggests, for example, that self-help financial groups manage large amounts of money in countries as diverse as Cameroon, Ethiopia, Ghana, and South Africa. In some countries, including Egypt, Gambia, and Nigeria, informal money-keepers keep substantial amounts of cash for rural people. In most countries, merchants, dealers, and traders extend large amounts of informal loans to facilitate purchase or sale of products and inputs (Meyer and others).

3.5 Most central markets in Africa have dense networks of informal financial arrangements and many villages have one or more self-help financial groups (see Bouman; Lukhele; Seibel and Marx; Shrieder and Cuevas; Shipton). In West Africa (Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Nigeria, at least) susu or tontine collectors mobilize surprising amounts of money informally from poor people (Steel and Aryeetey). In some countries, including Algeria, Ghana, Lesotho, and Somalia, substantial inflows of remittances to rural households dwarf donor and government efforts in rural finance. These informal systems would not be persistent if most Africans did not fulfill their informal financial obligations and derive substantial benefits from these arrangements.

3.6 The experience with formal rural finance, on the other hand, has been much less satisfactory. Millions of borrowers across the continent have failed to repay their loans from development banks and from co-operatives. Most countries in Africa have also endured episodic institutional fads: co-operative credit organizations sponsored by the British, credit unions promoted by North Americans, rural private banks and supervised credit programs promoted by the Americans, specialized agricultural development banks supported by the World Bank and the French, and more recently, a variety of non-governmental organizations that specialize in microlending, especially for women.4

4 Institutional transplants in some Asian countries have been more successful. The Japanese transferred their co-operative agricultural credit/deposit model successfully to both Korea and to Taiwan. Some of the rural financial institutions started by the Dutch in Indonesia flourished and grew into efficient forms of rural

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3.7 In many countries, governments or donors have also attempted to force commercial banks to lend more to agriculture. Concessionary rediscount lines in central banks, subsidized loan guarantee schemes, and lending quotas have been elements of these efforts. Unfortunately, no aggregate figures exist on the number of these efforts or their costs. Over the period 1967 to 1987, the World Bank alone financed 167 projects in Africa with major agricultural credit or rural credit components. The total value of these credit efforts was US$390 million. 5 If it were possible to aggregate other government- or donor-sponsored agricultural credit programs, the total likely would be many multiples of the World Bank’s commitments.

3.8 With few exceptions, the results of these programs have been disappointing. Some of them may have had positive, short-run effects on agricultural production and investment, but most of these effects were transitory. At the start of the second millennium, few countries in Africa had a healthy agricultural sector, and even fewer countries had durable and efficient rural financial infrastructure. Probably more rural Africans had dependable access to formal finance several decades earlier than in the year 2000. Many postal savings systems, government-owned development banks, credit co-operatives, and credit unions that once provided financial services in rural areas either have disappeared altogether, have little outreach, are heavily subsidy dependent, or are moribund. Aside from the African Development Bank, other major donors have terminated or substantially reduced lines of credit through agricultural development banks to promote agricultural development in Africa.

Explanations for the Poor Performance

3.9 Various explanations exist for the disappointing performance in Africa. In some cases natural disasters such as floods or droughts undermined for a time the performance of rural finance in Africa. However, man-made disasters in the form of wars, bad governance, hostile macroeconomic environments, damaging financial policies, and poorly designed projects are more general explanations for these unfavorable results.

3.10 Rural financial markets can only expand and thrive where law and order exists, where inflation does not discourage savings and continually erode the real value of financial assets, where economic policies result in attractive investment opportunities in rural areas, and where financial markets are not heavily repressed by government controls. Repressive instruments include interest rate ceilings, excessive legal reserve requirements, large numbers of directed credit programs, loan guarantee schemes, defective bank regulation and supervision, and limits on bank branching.

finance.5 A survey done in 1987 of these projects suggested that few of them would have been classified as success stories (Thillairajah).

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3.11 The designers of donor and government-funded credit programs also contributed to the poor performance of rural credit projects. Most of these efforts, for example, were based on the assumption that credit shortages were a major constraint on agricultural production and investment. Based on this assumption, donors and governments strove to augment the supply of agricultural loans through lines of credit in government-owned development banks. Projects usually were designed to provide an infusion of funds to ease credit constraints in the project area.

3.12 As a result, project outreach was often limited. In some cases this involved repeated injections of funds without increasing the overall capacity of rural financial markets to sustain financial services. Benefiting from hindsight, the project designers might have asked more fundamental questions like Why do rural financial markets lack the capacity or incentive to provide loans that donor employees think are required for development? And, how can one design a project that will enhance the sustained performance of providers of rural financial services so that periodic insertions of outside funds are unnecessary?

3.13 Several other features of donor-sponsored credit programs negatively affected the performance of these markets. In some cases, donors and governments applied concessionary terms to agricultural loans. This made it impossible for lenders to cover their costs and risks of lending, thereby, de-capitalizing lenders and condemning them to subsidy dependency. Furthermore, in many cases, the rates of interest allowed on agricultural loans were less than rates of inflation, thus assuring that the purchasing power of the lender’s portfolio would further diminish over time. Tolerance of massive loan defaults further shrunk the funds that lenders had to re-lend. In most cases the infusion of funds at concessionary prices also discouraged the financial system from mobilizing deposits, because it was cheaper for lenders to process inexpensive donor and government funds for agricultural lending than it was to mobilize small voluntary deposits in rural areas.

3.14 Large numbers of targeted credit programs sponsored by donors and governments also increased the costs of participating lenders. Each of these lines of credit typically had idiosyncratic lending and reporting requirements. In most cases the types of information collected to satisfy the accounting necessities of the funds provider were of little use to managers of the financial institution. The information required by the providers of targeted credit funds warped management information systems. In doing so, it crowded out more useful management information such as timely loan recovery data and information on operating costs.

Recent Reforms

3.15 With assistance from the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bank, a number of countries in Africa implemented important macroeconomic and financial market reforms during the 1990s that provided a more positive environment for rural finance projects. Macroeconomic reforms include lessening

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distortions in foreign exchange markets, reductions in subsidies and price controls, and privatization of major industries. In the financial sector, some of the useful reforms included liberalization and rationalization of interest rate policies, bank restructuring and privatization, and bank liquidation.6

4.0. ADB’s RURAL FINANCE ACTIVITIES

4.1 The ADB funded or co-funded almost 2,400 projects between 1967 and 2000. Cumulatively, slightly less than one-fifth of the total funds disbursed by the bank have been for agricultural purposes. In the late 1990s, agricultural projects made up over one-quarter of the value of the active portfolio of ADB, indicating that agricultural projects increased in importance over time. As much as one-third of the total value of these agricultural projects was comprised of funds for rural credit. Most of these projects can be assigned to one of three groups:

4.2 First, the bulk of the money lent by the bank for agricultural credit purposes involved loans made through traditional agricultural development banks. Examples of these projects can be found in Algeria, Egypt, Ghana, Morocco, and Tunisia. In most cases these loans were made to provide foreign exchange for imports and also to augment the supply of local funds available for agricultural credit programs. (See box No. 1.)

Box Number 1, Line-of-Credit Loans in Tunisia.

In 1985 the ADB extended a loan of UA 18 million to the National Agricultural Bank of Tunisia. The foreign exchange involved was used to finance imports required in agricultural sub-projects financed by the agricultural bank. This loan was totally disbursed by 1991 and a second line of credit for UA 50 million was extend to the agricultural bank by ADB that began to disburse several years later. The objective of the second loan was to strengthen the operations of the agricultural bank and to expand its volume of lending.

4.3 Second, a substantial amount of money was also channeled through agricultural credit components that were included as part of more comprehensive development projects. These components were designed to foster the adoption of new technology, stimulate targeted farm enterprises, or facilitate a targeted investment. Credit-component projects have a long history in the bank, and many of the Bank's agricultural projects have included line items for credit augmentation. Use of these components is an admission that the existing rural financial system is unable to provide sufficient loans to support the activities stressed in the project. (See box No. 2).

Box Number 2, An ADB project that includes a credit component: The Cashew Project in Ghana.6 See African Development Report 1997 for further discussion of these economic reforms. The reforms that were specifically aimed at financial sectors are described in ADB, “Bank Group Financial Reforms.”

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Ghana requested an ADB loan of nearly UA 10 million in 2000 to promote cashew production. More than 40 percent of this loan was earmarked for a lending scheme to promote cashews. The Agricultural Development Bank of Ghana administered the credit component. Both individual and group loans were allowed under the project.

4.4 Third, in 1991 ADB began to experiment with microlending. Some of these involved loans to non-traditional lenders in rural areas: credit unions, village banks, other non-governmental organizations, and government parastatals. In some cases, funds from these loans were channeled to the ultimate lender through a second tier institution (see box Number 3). By 2000 ADB had programs in 21 countries with microfinance components, some of which were formed through the leadership of AMINA, a small unit in the Bank devoted to promoting micro-finance7. A number of these programs were co-financed with the World Bank and involved modest credit components for microlending, especially for women. The total value of these micro-credit components in late 2000 was about US$150 million, perhaps something less than half going into rural or peri-urban areas.

Box Number 3, An ADB project that works through non-traditional rural lenders: Irrigation Project in Zambia.

During the construction of the Kariba dam in the 1950s a number of families were displaced and relocated in 60 settlements elsewhere in the Southern Providence of Zambia. An ADB loan for about UA 5.3 million was proposed in 2000 to build small-scale irrigation schemes and to establish five new village banks in these settlements. About 15 percent of the funds for the project were to be set aside to establish a credit fund. These loan funds were to be channeled through a commercial bank, to a selected micro-financial intermediary, and then to new village banks affiliated with existing or newly formed cooperatives. Farmers received group loans with five members in each group. The village banks were to be capitalized by withholding 15 percent of the value of each loan, which then became share capital owned by the borrowers. Village banks were designed to accept voluntary deposits.

Traditional Objectives and Evaluation

4.5 Most of the Bank's projects with agricultural credit features had the objective of promoting project activities such as selected crops or farm enterprises, new technologies, or rural investments. Serious evaluations of these credit projects require measuring the impact of credit use on the activities selected as goals for

7 AMINA stands for ADB’s Micro-Finance Initiative for Africa

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the project. Credit-impact studies, however, are expensive to do and are laced with methodological difficulties.8

4.6 These studies involve collecting substantial amounts of primary information from borrowers who participated in the program (see Appendix Number 1). As a result, it is not surprising that few of the evaluations of ADB-funded agricultural credit projects include empirical information about credit impact. During project implementation, a lot of weight is put on disbursement of loan funds and compliance with the Bank's accounting and reporting requirements. Consequently, evaluation studies found that the issues of outreach and sustainability seldom received attention.

Lessons Learned

4.7 The primary lessons that can be gleaned from the Bank's experience in rural finance include the following:

Hostile macroeconomic and macro-finance environments had powerful negative impacts on rural finance projects. Nonetheless, recent reforms provide more hospitable environments for new approaches in rural finance;

Until recently, few of the Bank's projects were directed at expanding and enhancing rural financial infrastructure that primarily served poor people in rural areas. Few of these new projects have been carefully evaluated.

As a result, the bank must mostly look elsewhere for best practices and success stories in microfinance. Fortunately, the microlending industry has ample experience in many countries that can provide useful guidelines for ADB. There are many publications available on best practices, useful guidelines, and examples of success and failure. Although ADB is a late entrant to this field, it can benefit greatly from the experience of others.

The ADB has done very little lending to promote deposit mobilization. Although an increasingly dense network of organizations in the microlending industry exists worldwide, little experimentation in the mobilization of deposits in rural areas has been done. As a result, few experts and even fewer publications on this topic exist. A small number of successful programs in Asia and a handful of interesting pilot projects in Latin America, nonetheless, provide useful guidelines for deposit mobilization efforts.

Questions as to whether past ADB agricultural credit efforts were successful in boosting agricultural growth are moot. Instead, the critical focus for the Bank now is how to reduce poverty more directly, and in that context, how to employ rural financial markets more effectively in these efforts.9

8 A comprehensive World Bank evaluation of its agricultural credit activities illustrates these problems (World Bank, 1993).

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Aside from a few recent projects, most of the Bank’s efforts in rural finance have paid only modest attention to creating additional financial infrastructure in rural areas or been successful in enhancing the performance of existing infrastructure.10 Adjustments in Bank practices to implement the New Vision and the application of a new rural finance paradigm will require more attention to building efficient financial infrastructure that is capable of providing sustainable rural finance services to poor people.

5.0. SWITCH IN PARADIGMS

5.1 The dismal performance of traditional agricultural credit programs, coupled with the increasing reliance on market forces to guide development and heightened concerns about poverty, have caused most major donors to sharply decrease their commitments to targeted credit in all sectors, but especially in agriculture. This has been accompanied by a major switch in the dominant paradigm used to formulate rural finance programs. Under the old paradigm, subsidized and targeted agricultural credit was often an important part of attempts to promote agricultural growth. Under the new rural finance paradigm, more emphasis is placed on strengthening rural financial infrastructure and improving its performance, especially regarding those services used by poor people.

5.2 As is explained in more detail below, one of the most important lessons learned from directed credit efforts is that due to the excess demand for agricultural credit engendered by heavy subsidies, poor people are able to capture few of the subsidies associated with these loans. Experience has also shown that new technology and product and input prices are far more important than the price or availability of credit in influencing production and investment decisions.11

Furthermore, there is ample empirical evidence to show that credit targeting and credit subsidies reduce the ability of financial systems to assist with the efficient allocation of resources.

Comparison of The Old and New Paradigms in Rural Finance

5.3 Differences in nine features distinguish the old and new paradigms in rural finance.12 As can be noted in Table 1, these features include problem definition, the role assigned to financial markets, and how users of financial services are viewed. They also include the involvement of financial systems in administering

9 If done well, some of the improved practices introduced through successful microfinance projects may spill over into improving traditional credit practices.10 Exceptions are new microfinance projects in some countries, such as Cape Verde, Senegal, and Malawi.11 During the 1970s several countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Sri Lanka sharply increased the availability of formal agricultural credit. Subsequently, inflation, financial market reforms, and changes in development policies resulted in sharp declines in the total real value of formal agricultural credit in these countries – as much as halving earlier volumes of formal agricultural credit. Despite these sharp reductions in credit supplies, the rates of agricultural growth over the same periods show few or only minor fundamental changes in historical patterns of growth.12 See Vogel and Adams, 1997b for further discussion of the two paradigms.

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taxes and subsidies, the primary sources of funds used in the system, the nature of associated information systems, views about sustainability and outreach, and how activities are evaluated.

Table 1: Primary features of the old and new paradigms

Features Directed Credit Paradigm

Financial Market Paradigm

1. Problem definition Overcoming market imperfections

Lowering transaction costs

2. Role of financial markets

-help the poor-stimulate production

Intermediate efficiently

3. View of users Beneficiaries: borrowers Clients: borrowers and depositors

4. Subsidies and taxes Lots of both-subsidy dependent

Few of either-subsidy independent

5. Sources of funds Vertical: governments and donors

Horizontal: primarily voluntary deposits

6. Associated information systems

Dense, fragmented and vertical – were targets met?

Less dense and mainly horizontal – management information

7. Sustainability Largely ignored Major concern8. Outreach Mostly ignored Primary concern9. Evaluations Credit impact on

beneficiaries – mainly primary data

Performance of financial institutions – mostly secondary information

5.4 The directed credit paradigm focuses on overcoming imperfections in financial markets and assigns a robust role to these markets in addressing numerous social and economic problems.13 Borrowers under this old paradigm are often referred to as beneficiaries who receive loans that are subsidized either through concessionary interest rates or through loan defaults. Because of these subsidies a substantial portion of the funds involved in directed lending is provided by a governments and donors. These programs, in turn, typically require lenders to develop dense information systems that demonstrate compliance with loan targeting provisions as well as collect information on the impact of loan use among borrowers. Typically, under the old paradigm, little concern is given to the sustainability or long-term outreach of the credit program.

5.5 The new financial market paradigm, in contrast, assigns a limited role to financial markets. That role is assisting in the efficient allocation of resources through mobilizing deposits from surplus clients and then lending the surplus funds to

13 Initially, market imperfections were vaguely defined by citing the high interest rates charged on informal loans and the inability of poor people to access formal loans. Later, economists, particularly Joseph Stiglitz, supplied a more rigorous definition of imperfections.

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clients with economic opportunities but with too few resources to capitalize on these opportunities. The new paradigm stresses the importance of lowering transaction costs in these markets and regards depositors and borrowers as valued clients. Under the new paradigm, financial markets avoid taxing or subsidizing market participants.

5.6 Because of the emphasis on deposit mobilization under this paradigm, deposits eventually provide most funds for lending. Since financial institutions are not involved in targeted lending their information systems are less dense than are those managing directed debt. Instead of evaluating performance by trying to measure loan impact among borrowers’ activities, the new paradigm concentrates on measuring the performance of financial institutions using secondary data such as lender profits, loan recovery performance, outreach, and subsidy-dependency. Because of the emphasis on developing strong and efficient financial markets, sustainability of lending and deposit mobilization efforts is a major concern.

Subsidized Credit and Poverty Alleviation

5.7 The attachment of subsidies to loans and attempts to direct these subsidized loans to groups or activities selected by policy makers is the feature that most clearly distinguishes the old and new paradigms. The structures of financial systems involved in directed lending are also distinctive. Typically, government-owned institutions are in the midst of credit-directing efforts and several techniques are used to channel funds into directed lending. Most commonly, the central bank offers rediscount lines that permit financial institutions to access government or donor funds at below-market rates for targeted purposes. Another technique is to require financial institutions to lend a certain amount for targeted purposes, or to deposit funds at concessionary rates in other institutions that are able to comply with loan-target quotas. In practice, most of the countries heavily involved in directed lending use both techniques.

5.8 Forms of loan subsidies: Three types of subsidy may be associated with loans: an interest rate subsidy that might be captured by either the lender or borrower, a default subsidy that is captured by the borrower, and implicit subsidies embedded in loan guarantee programs that are usually captured by lenders. Interest rate subsidies occur when borrowers are charged interest rates that are below market rates for similar loan contracts with the rate of subsidy being the difference between the two rates. This may involve lenders receiving concessionary funding from governments or donors, or final borrowers receiving loans that carry concessionaL terms. A default subsidy occurs when borrowers fail to repay all or part of their loans with the amount of the subsidy being the loan principal and interest due but not recovered by the lender.

5.9 The magnitude of the interest rate subsidy increases when nominal interest rate policies are sticky and inflation increases. Likewise, the magnitude of the default subsidy usually increases when: (a) loans are made quickly; (b) loans are allocated on the basis of need and not effective demand; (c) the macroeconomic

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environment deteriorates; and (d) when loans are made by organizations that lack experience in creditworthy lending. Typically, loan guarantee programs that support directed credit are subsidized by governments or donors, and this subsidy most often is captured by lenders who shift part of their loan recovery risk to the guarantee program.

5.10 Someone ultimately pays for all subsidies. As a result, credit subsidies entail implicit taxes. These taxes might be paid by foreign citizens who provide donor funds to finance credit subsidies; by domestic citizens who pay taxes that are used to fund credit subsidies; or by all holders of financial assets -- particularly depositors -- whose real values of financial assets erode with the onslaught of inflation. The overall social benefits of subsidized credit programs are partly determined by who receives the subsidies and partly by who pays the associated tax. If, for example, relatively well-to-do borrowers captured most of the credit subsidy, while most of the associated taxes are paid by poorer depositors or by poorer taxpayers, one might conclude the program yielded negative social benefits.

5.11 One of the strongest reasons usually advanced by those in favor of maintaining subsidies is that subsidies represent the most direct way to assure an equitable redistribution of income. They argue that small holder farmers pay high producer taxes on the export crops they grow, and so the subsidies are meant to compensate them for those heavy producer taxes. Another strong argument advanced by proponents of farmer subsidies is that even the Western and advanced countries spend billions of dollars to subsidize agricultural production and protect the interests of their farmers, so what is wrong with developing countries follow suit?

5.12 The case for/against subsidies: This policy guideline is not against the provision of farmer subsidies aimed at supporting African agriculture. Rather, what it is against is the type and mode of administering subsidies that never reach their intended beneficiaries. When agricultural credit is priced below market-clearing levels, the excess demand created engenders a rationing credit delivery system that only tends to promote rent-seeking behavior and corruption among government officials with the end result that the bulk of the funds get siphoned to those with political clout.

5.13 The net effect is three-fold. First, the rationing system only adds to the already high transaction costs of administering small amounts of credit to a large number of scattered small holder farmers and rural operators. Second, as long as rent-seeking behavior is used to justify subsidized credit, an infinite supply of funds will be required to meet the “over-blown” demand for credit, throwing into question the long term financial sustainability of the credit scheme. Third, channeling huge amounts of cheap subsidized credit through the formal financial system introduces distortions that can have adverse effects on the overall financial system.

5.14 This paper, therefore, advocates that rural finance programs should be designed and administered in such a way that credit subsidies do not lead to distortions in

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the overall financial system, and also that the subsidies are financial sustainable over the long term. In practice, this implies that the use of credit subsidies should be limited, clearly budgeted, time-bound, and linked solely to start-up activities and training programs of indigenous credit and savings societies.

5.15 Why cheap credit did not reduce poverty: A subsidized credit program is only effective in treating poverty if poor people capture most of the associated subsidy. Two elements determine the distribution of credit subsidies: the access to subsidized credit and the magnitude of the subsidy attached to the loan. Only those who receive subsidized loans, for example, benefit from the loan subsidy, with the magnitude of the subsidy captured by those with credit access determined by a subsidy formula.

5.16 Who receives subsidized loans? At first blush, this appears to be a superficial question since many subsidized credit programs are directed at pre-selected target groups such as poor people, women, micro-entrepreneurs, or operators of small farms. Research on microfinance, however, shows that the differences between what the designers of directed credit programs intended and what later actually happened may differ substantially because of the microeconomic interests of dozens of lenders and thousands of borrowers whose actions take place beyond the control of credit planners.

5.17 Loan access is determined by actions of both lenders and borrowers. Attaching a subsidy to loans complicates analysis of these actions. As already argued, when the subsidy component is relatively large, it may convert borrowers into rent seekers who primarily wish to capture the subsidy rather than to apply borrowed resources in a profitable economic activity. If the subsidy component is large enough, the demand for subsidized loans may become essentially infinite, thereby forcing lenders to ration loans through non-interest rate mechanisms. This might include lenders imposing additional loan transaction costs on non-preferred clients to discourage them from asking for credit, and loan officers’ participating in rent seeking by soliciting bribes.

5.18 Lending small amounts to new clients, especially those in rural areas, is naturally costly and risky for lenders. Credit subsidies make this type of lending even less attractive for lenders. The net result of this is likely to be lenders favoring previous clients over new clients, and lenders preferring large loans over small loans, thereby further shrinking poor peoples' access to formal loans.

5.19 The subsidy formula: In most subsidized credit programs, the interest rate subsidy and the default subsidy are always proportional to the size of the loan. If the interest rate subsidy, for example, is equal to 10 percent of the value of the loan, a borrower of $100 receives an interest subsidy equal to 1/10th the size of the interest subsidy received by someone who receives a loan 10 times as large (or $1,000). Likewise, a borrower who fails to repay a loan of $100 receives a default subsidy that is only 1/10th the size of the default subsidy captured by someone who fails to repay a loan of $1,000.

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5.20 This leads to the following general conclusion that:

those who are unable to access subsidized loans receive no loan subsidy;

those who obtain small, subsidized loans receive small subsidies; and

those with access to large loans receive large subsidies.

Since loan access and wealth are highly correlated everywhere, subsidies attached to loans are inevitably distributed regressively. In the end, those borrowers who are more well off and politically powerful capture a larger proportion of the total subsidy than do those who are less well off and who have a weak political voice. If a uniform formula regarding interest rates and loan recovery enforcement is applied to all borrowers, subsidies attached to loans exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, income- and wealth-distribution problems.

5.21 To overcome this proportionality problem, policy makers may attempt to adjust the subsidy formula in favor of the poor. This might include loan size ceilings on subsidized loans, application of differential interest rates on loans, or application of differential loan recovery standards depending on loan size. All three of these policy options have important implication for the microeconomic decisions made by affected lenders. If, for example, the loan-size ceiling is binding and attempts to force lenders to make smaller loans than they would otherwise voluntarily choose to make, lenders may meet the letter of the law by making multiple loans that fit under the ceiling to single individuals or families that are normally favored by the lender. The lender thereby evades the spirit of the law and avoids making additional small loans to new clients.

5.22 Preferential interest rates and preferential loan recovery standards on loans to poor people provide perverse incentives for lenders. In large part, formal lenders avoid making small loans to new clients because the costs of doing so often exceed expected revenues. Forcing lenders to charge even lower interest rates on these loans and asking them to tolerate higher rates of default on these types of loans than they would otherwise, makes lending to poor people even less attractive. Lenders may feel compelled for public relations purposes to do token poverty lending under these preferential subsidy formulas, but they will do so with little enthusiasm or outreach. In the end, the ultimate objective of reaching large numbers of the poor is defeated, with the subsidized funds going to politically powerful interest groups with clout in the society.

5.23 The proportionality feature of loan subsidies and the perverse incentives provided to lenders by preferential subsidy formulas have caused some students of microfinance to conclude that subsidized loans are uniquely unsuitable for treating poverty. Because subsidized credit is associated with even lower interest rates on deposits, and since many of the potential users of deposit services are poor people, cheap credit may have a triple negative effect on the poor. First, the poor are unable to capture a significant portion of the credit subsidy. Second, because of cheap credit policies they have no access to attractive deposit services, and,

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third, in the long run, the processing of subsidizing loans is likely to weaken or even destroy the very financial infrastructure that might otherwise provide financial services to poor people.

Subsidized Credit and Production

5.24 Subsidized credit was used under the old paradigm as a tool to boost production, investment, and/or technological change. Economic logic shows, however, that the relationship between the price of a loan and the incentives to produce, to invest, or to use new technology is ambiguous, especially in rural and microlending. The prices and yields of the goods that borrowers produce have far more powerful impact on producers’ decisions than do loan subsidies.

5.25 A simple example may help clarify this important point. In several countries in Latin America, farmers with small units find it highly profitable to grow coca plants whose leaves are used in the production of cocaine. These farmers live in remote areas where the yields and prices of other crops they might raise are relatively low and unstable. From an economic point of view, these farmers maximize their profits by specializing in coca production; the income derived thereby is far higher than from any other alternative.

5.26 These farmers are also rational in accepting subsidized loans directed at alternative crop production, thereby capturing the credit subsidy. They continue their rationality by only growing a token amount of the alternative crop and diverting most of the borrowed liquidity into additional consumption, or into the planting of more coca. The availability of the borrowed funds and the interest rate attached to the loan does not alter the relative profitability (or desirability) of the economic choices faced by the borrowers – coca production is always their best choice.

5.27 The second-best argument: Attempts to compensate farmers through subsidized credit is similarly ineffective. A government, for example, may have price controls or exchange rate regimes that depress the price farmers receive for their cocoa. As a supposed second-best solution, the government may attempt to compensate farmers for some of the losses in income they suffer because of the low prices by dispensing subsidized credit.

5.28 There are two primary problems with this. First, it is impossible to fairly match the amount of “taxes” imposed on the cocoa growers by the price distortion with the amount of the credit subsidies. All cocoa growers pay the price-distortion tax in proportion to the amount of cocoa they sell at the depressed prices. Only those who can access the subsidized credit, however, receive a compensating subsidy. Since credit subsidies, as suggested earlier, tend to shrink the access of non-preferred borrowers to cheap credit, a few large borrowers are likely to capture the bulk of the so-called compensating credit subsidies, thereby violating the fairness principle of the second best: all producers pay the tax, but only a few are compensated through subsidies.

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5.29 Production is the second problem with using cheap credit to compensate for low cocoa prices. As mentioned earlier, receiving a subsidized loan does not affect the relative attractiveness of the economic choices that are faced by the borrower. If farmers view additional cocoa production as not worth doing, the availability of cheap credit will not alter that perception. They may take the loan with concessionary terms to capture the associated subsidy, but they have no economic reason to direct these borrowed resources into an activity they perceive will yield low returns. Credit subsidies may attract borrowers but will have little effect on their decisions to produce, invest, or use new technology.

5.30 The fungibility of money allows borrowers to direct the additional liquidity provided by loans to activities that offer the highest expected marginal returns, regardless of whether these activities are the objective of the subsidized loan. If the targeted activities are perceived as high return activities by borrowers, credit subsidies or loan targeting is unnecessary.

6.0. MARKETING NICHES

6.1 Realizing the goal of poverty alleviation and employing the new paradigm would require major changes in the Bank addresses rural finance. It also forces the Bank to identify niches in rural financial markets that are within its capabilities.

6.2 Comprehensive reform of rural financial markets in the extremely diverse regional member countries (RMCs) would require a lot more resources than the Bank has or is likely to have in the future. The Bank must, therefore, carefully select a small number of marketing niches for its rural finance programs that are consistent with its resource outlay and with the new paradigm on rural finance. Selecting these niches should also take into consideration what other donors are doing in Africa.

6.3 One way of identifying marketing niches for the Bank’s poverty alleviation efforts is to study the informal financial products and services that are popular among poor people. Informal finance involves small transactions, procedures that impose few transaction cost on clients, large numbers of people who save through money-keepers or in self-help financial groups, flexible loan procedures, and short-term loans. As a starting point, therefore, the Bank’s micro-finance efforts must be designed to provide financial products and services that at least partially compete with informal finance. In some cases this will involve forming new organizations that specialize in microlending. In other cases it may include strengthening and expanding existing organizations that do microfinance. It will also require creative work in reforming or building new financial infrastructure that can effectively mobilize rural deposits. More deposit mobilization, in turn, requires enhanced prudential regulation and supervision of deposit takers.

Box Number 4, Self-help Financial Groups in Cameroon

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Self-help financial groups are widespread and important in Cameroon. It has been estimated that nearly 80 percent of the adults in the country participate in these groups and that they manage about half of the total financial savings nationwide. An historical case study of one of these groups suggested that some of these organizations may persist over long periods of time and may grow increasingly complex as they evolve. These groups may manage multiple funds that rotate the distribution of funds among members. Groups may also develop parallel, non-rotating funds that assemble money from group members that is used for emergencies, or used as a loan fund. These groups may perform social as well as economic functions. In some cases, members of the group may also meet periodically to share business information.

Source: Tonkou and Adams

Three Potential Niches

6.4 The niches that the Bank might fill to help poor people through rural financial markets are the following:

First, the Bank might support the establishment and growth of specialized microlending organizations that operate mainly in rural or peri-urban areas. These organizations should not be viewed as charities but rather as ways to provide sustained financial services to people of modest means;

Second, the Bank could also support the reform and establishment of financial organizations that efficiently mobilize voluntary deposits in rural areas. Some organizations might be NGOs that start out specializing in microlending, but later develop the capacity to collect and manage voluntary deposits. Other organizations, such as postal savings systems and credit unions and banks, might be involved in projects primarily aimed at encouraging them to expand savings opportunities for rural people; or

Third, the Bank could reinforce the capability of central monetary authorities to regulate and provide prudential supervision to those organizations that are involved in mobilizing rural deposits. This may require regulatory innovations where postal savings systems, credit unions, and other NGOs are doing deposit mobilization.

7.0. GUIDELINES FOR DESIGNING RURAL FINANCE PROJECTS

7.1 The huge diversity among member countries makes it virtually impossible to provide detailed uniform guidelines – recipes -- that can be routinely applied to all of the Bank's rural microfinance projects. Moreover, microfinance is a new industry where best practices are still evolving. As a result, project designers must tailor each project to fit local conditions and read recent literature14 on micro-finance to keep abreast with new guidelines. ADB micro-finance project designers should refer to recent publications that describe in detail how to formulate

14 See Appendix 7 for contact information about new publications on micro-finance.

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microfinance projects, how to design financial products, how to establish management information systems, how to set up accounting systems, and how to measure performance.15

7.2 Some general issues, however, must be dealt with in the design of every project. These issues range from assuring that the economic environment will reinforce a project, to designing appropriate evaluation criteria. Understanding why some practices must be avoided and outlining new practices that should not be overlooked are a major part of these guidelines.

7.3 Three general problems, namely: transaction costs, risks, and quality of services, must be kept in mind when developing any microfinance project for rural areas. The transaction costs that are typically imposed on financial market participants and the associated risks of lending and making deposits are the primary explanations for the scarcity of formal and semi-formal finance in rural areas. Every micro-finance project must reduce these costs and risks if it is to have a high probability of success. Neither lender nor borrower will eagerly participate in a microfinance program if the transaction costs of doing so are onerous. Moreover, lenders must be confident that they will recover most of their loans, and depositors must feel that their deposits are safe.16 Equally important, clients will not sustain their participation in microfinance programs if the quality of the financial products and services are unsatisfactory.

Necessary Preconditions

7.4 In substantial part, the success or failure of microfinance projects depends on the environment in which they operate; hostile environments can damage even the most carefully designed project.17 Conducive environments include law and order, price stability, laws that allow flexible interest rate policies, and the absence of competing lenders that are poorly managed; loan repayment discipline is more difficult to cultivate among borrowers who have been conditioned to expect that loans need not be repaid.

7.5 Deposit mobilization and successful lending are also more difficult in areas that lack attractive investment opportunities. This may be because of natural causes such as persistent drought or government policies. Distorted exchange rates and other trade policies, for example, often effectively tax the agricultural sector and thereby diminish both rural incomes and rates of return on rural investments. Price controls on food commodities have the same effect. Where these types of price distortions are severe, it is probably best to look elsewhere for project possibilities.

15 At the time this paper was written, the state-of-the-art in this regard was the Microfinance Handbook complied by Joanna Ledgewood. The Microbanking Bulletin published by CALMEADOW is also another excellent source of information on microfinance. Periodic publications issued by the Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP) are other useful sources of new information about microfinance.16 The risks of microlending are exacerbated by the paucity of bankable collateral among poor people, an important point discussed by de Soto.17 See Lockwood, Chapter 1 for an expanded discussion of these issues.

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7.6 In some African countries, such as Ghana, Egypt, and Lesotho, remittances flowing into rural areas are substantial. Where these remittances occur, there may be more opportunities for deposit mobilization than where these flows are absent.

7.7 The success of a microfinance project may also depend on the presence of other social infrastructure. Dependable electricity, a good and functional telephone network into the rural areas, roads, and court systems all contribute to lessening the costs and risks inherent in microfinance. It is also cheaper to make small loans and mobilize small deposits in areas where populations are relatively dense and where levels of education are relatively high. These factors help explain why microfinance programs have been concentrated in urban centers.

Crowding Out

7.8 A form of Gresham’s Law operates in rural finance. The Law states that bad money replaces good money; people attempt to pass on to others units of money they distrust or dislike and hold types of money they think are more desirable. In rural finance, a variant of Gresham’s Law operates when inefficient finance replaces or crowds out efficient finance.

7.9 Crowding out occurs when a lender provides subsidized financial services that undermine or eliminate competition. Examples of this are the activities of highly subsidized traditional agricultural development banks in many countries. These banks often subsist on hefty subsidies, part of which they pass along to their clients in the form of low interest rates on loans and in the guise of loan defaults. 18

Non-subsidized lenders find it difficult to operate in such environments for two reasons. First, they cannot compete with the subsidized interest rates offered by development banks, and second, they typically encounter difficulties with loan repayment in the same areas where many borrowers from development banks seem to avoid repayment and get away with it.

7.10 Similar crowding out occurs when one or several NGOs provide subsidized loans in rural areas and thereby unfairly compete with other lenders who operate without subsidies. Crowding out also diminishes the amount of informal finance in rural areas.

7.11 Where crowding out is severe, it will be difficult for the ADB to develop microfinance projects that will have high probabilities of success. In these cases the lender(s) that is (are) causing the crowding out must either be liquidated or substantially reformed to eliminate and/or minimize unfair competition. Experience in several Latin American countries (in Peru and Bolivia, for example) suggests that the financial vacuum created by liquidating Agricultural Development Banks is gradually filled with time. Some of the filling is done by an expansion of informal

18 Bank employees also often capture some of the subsidies in the form of bribes or redundant employment.

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finance and some is done by formation of new financial institutions. Still more filling is done by an expansion of existing financial institutions into rural areas.

Sector Studies

7.12 Ideally, project design should be preceded by a study of the financial sector.19

The study should clarify the extent to which there is a market for the proposed project and also conduct a diagnosis to explain why more formal and semi-formal finance does not penetrate the rural area, thereby laying the groundwork for an ADB project that will overcome these problems. The study should include an overall assessment of the economic environment for microfinance in rural areas and an analysis of the laws and regulations that might impede the expansion of formal or semi-formal finance into the countryside. It should also document the status of formal and semi-formal finance in rural areas, along with any major in-flows of remittances. The status of usury laws, the coverage of prudential regulation and supervision, and requirements of licenses or permission to lend or to mobilize deposits should also be covered by the study.

7.13 In some cases it may also be useful to provide histories of any postal savings or credit union activities in the country, along with an inventory of non-governmental organizations that provides financial services in rural areas. Likewise, an inventory and assessment of NGOs that provide financial services largely in urban areas might identify organizations that are using interesting innovations or which have potential to expand into rural areas. The study might also answer questions such as the following:

Are there financial organizations operating badly in the rural area that might be crowding out more efficient forms of finance?

Could their activities adversely affect an ADB program?

7.14 The study should also collect information about common forms of informal finance in rural areas. This information can be useful in two ways for designers of ADB projects. It can show the extent of the competition that a project might face and also identify the types of microfinance that are most popular in the countryside.20

7.15 Finally, the study should conclude with recommendations that are useful in designing ADB projects and in selecting financial organization participants.21 Will it be necessary to create new institutions to implement an ADB project? Are there existing institutions that might be reformed or assisted that could carry out ADB sponsored programs? What are the policy or legal changes that will be necessary to enhance the chances of success in an ADB project?

19 Two examples of useful financial sector studies in Africa are World Bank, 1995 (Nigeria) and Fitchett (Ghana).20 See Ledgerwood, Chapters 3 and 5 for further discussion of the design of microlending products and services.21 See Ledgerwood, Chapter 4 for additional discussion of the problems of selecting participating institutions.

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Transaction Costs

7.16 Micro-finance is often costly for both clients and intermediaries. Limiting or reducing these costs must be a primary concern for those who design and manage microfinance projects. Lenders will not make small loans if their loan transaction costs are excessive. Likewise, individuals will not seek loans if they are forced to navigate numerous administrative hurdles that impose hefty transaction costs on them. Deposits involve the same problem, so savers will not travel long distances or suffer administrative hassles to make small deposits, and intermediaries will avoid taking modest deposits if the costs of managing these accounts are substantial (see Appendix Number 2).

7.17 Project designers may address transaction costs in two ways. The first is through supporting the establishment of management information systems that allow the participating intermediary to process small loans or manage small deposits efficiently. The second way is to be judicious in setting up project-reporting requirements. Requiring the participating agency to collect and report data that is not useful in managing an efficient financial intermediary only elevates transaction costs. For example, information about the purported uses of loans is generally of little use to managers. Instead, project designers should require reports that document the progress made toward achieving sustainability, subsidy independence, and outreach goals.

Box Number 5, Use of Smart Cards in Swaziland

Even though the banking industry in Swaziland is fairly well developed, the commercial banks generally show little interest in the small businesses and the poorer segments of the market because of the usual constraints. The Swazi Business Growth Trust of Swaziland (SBGT) was therefore established in 1992 as a non-profit Swazi-directed NGO to facilitate the development and growth of Swazi small business. The Trust introduced a SmartCard to minimize the transaction costs associated with extending and recovering loans. The SBGT supplied participating commercial banks with the equipment that facilitated the use of the SmartCard at participating banks, which allowed SBGT clients to draw funds and make loan repayments and/or deposits. A SmartCard transaction takes only a fraction of both the time and cost of a regular teller transaction; and helps both outreach (in terms of the numbers reached) and easy access by clients to funds and loan repayments.

Source: Abstracted from Fitchett.

7.18 Managers of participating agencies should also be encouraged to make their financial services and products more attractive by reducing the transaction costs their procedures impose on clients. Many clients involved in small financial transactions are more concerned about these costs than they are about the interest paid on loans or received on deposits. Simplifying paperwork, opening branches near clients, and requiring fewer visits to negotiate loans are some of the ways of reducing these costs.

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Interest Rate Policies

7.19 The interest rates paid on deposits and those charged on loans are vital elements in microfinance programs. The former rate must be high enough to compete with other sources of deposit services. The interest rates charged on loans must be sufficient to eventually cover the costs and risks of making microloans. Temporary subsidies may be used to bridge the initial gap between the costs of providing small loans and what borrowers are charged. Plans should be made to close this gap though scale economies and other efficiencies so that the interest payments on loans cover the full costs and risks of making microloans in the foreseeable future.

7.20 Two general criteria should be used in setting interest rate policies for microlending programs. First, interest rates should not be used to subsidize borrowers. Second, interest charges should be enough to allow the lender to become subsidy independent, to protect the real value of its loan portfolio, and to become sustainable when the organization reaches a projected scale of operations.

7.21 No single market rate of interest can be used in microlending programs (see Appendix Number 3). Instead, project designers and managers must calculate unique rates for each program. Four major elements should be included in these calculations, namely:

projected administrative expenses,

projected loan losses,

the cost of funds, and

the desired capitalization rate.

Where inflation is expected to be important, the cost-of-funds element must be adjusted upward to protect the purchasing power of the lender’s loan portfolio. (For a practical guide on how to calculate these interest rates see CGAP Occasional Paper No. 1, 1996.)

7.22 If a project involves an institution that is new, has a small volume of lending, or which is expected to expand its scale of operations substantially with project assistance, interest rates likely will not cover all costs for several years. A subsidy for the organization may be justified until the lender achieves its projected scale of operations.22 That scale and the estimated time needed to achieve this goal should be part of the project design. Project reports should include indicators that measure the progress being made by the lender to become subsidy free.

22 CGAP estimates that most economies of scale in microlending are achieved with 5,000 to 10,000 clients.

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Short-term Subsidies

7.23 It may be necessary for project designers to include some short-term subsidies to support institutional development or expansion. The institution handling the project, for example, may need new offices or branches in rural areas to achieve outreach. Most participating institutions will also require investments in data processing equipment and training. Some of these investments might initially be subsidized through a carefully designed grants program (for example, see Westley and Branch, pp. 115-128).

7.24 The guiding principle of the grants program should be to reward performance. This might include allocating grants when management plans are complete, when loan recovery targets have been met, or when deposit mobilization goals have been achieved. The expectations of the managers of the program should be that subsidies will end in a relatively short period and that the institution must plan for subsidy independence.

Loan Guarantee Schemes

7.25 As mentioned earlier, microlending is constrained by the costs of making small loans as well as by the associated risks. Small loans often involve substantial risks because borrowers do not have bankable collateral and because the borrowers are not well known by the lender (information asymmetry problem). Subsidized loan guarantee schemes have been used widely to address these problems. Typically, these schemes involve the lender transferring all or part of the loan recovery risk to a third party who manages the loan guarantee program. The primary objective of these schemes is to induce lenders to make more loans to a target group than they would otherwise.

7.26 These guarantee programs have four major problems. First, they increase transaction costs by introducing a third party into the lending process. Second, all of these programs must be subsidized to start and persist. Third, no convincing evidence exists that these schemes result in much additional lending for targeted purposes (see Appendix Number 4). Fourth, the availability of the loan guarantee scheme may lessen the incentive that lenders have to pursue loan defaulters aggressively. Until more conclusive evidence is available on the costs and benefits of these programs, it is probably best for ADB to avoid putting resources into these schemes.

Deposit Mobilization

7.27 Deposit mobilization is important for three reasons. First, and foremost, under normal circumstances, a much larger number of poor people will avail themselves of deposit services than will use loans. Second, as mentioned earlier, a financial system must mobilize deposits if it is to assist in reallocating resources more efficiently. Third, deposit mobilization can force more discipline on financial

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intermediaries than occurs in organizations that largely depend on funding by donors or governments. Organizations that perform poorly generally experience more difficulty attracting deposits than do those that perform well. Also, depositors can discipline financial institutions by withdrawing funds from deposit takers that perform poorly, thereby depriving the organization of funds.

Box Number 6, Deposit mobilization in Peru

Economic turmoil and hyperinflation in Peru during the late 1980s and early 1990s severely stressed all banks in the country and made it difficult for them to mobilize deposits. Major economic and financial market reforms during the 1990s, however, gradually provided a more hospitable environment for deposit mobilization. During the later part of the 1990s several of the 13 Municipal Banks (Cajas Municipales de Ahorro y Credito) in Peru were highly successful in mobilizing small deposits. One of these banks, in Arequipa, was outstanding in these efforts. It was formed in 1985 and initially relied mostly on outside funding for money to lend. The bank experimented with various ways to attract more deposits, including doing lotteries that were tied to deposit accounts. Later, the bank placed more emphasis on providing attractive interest rates on deposits, making it easier for depositors to withdraw funds, and offering insurance that was tied to the deposit account. This included life insurance, burial insurance, and modest health insurance.

These attractive deposit accounts allowed the bank to more than double its number of deposit clients between 1996 and 1999. This resulted in the real value of deposits in the bank going up by about 150 percent in just three years and allowed the bank to reduce sharply its reliance on outside funds and to increase lending substantially.

Source: Swisscontract

7.28 Any deposit mobilization project that the Bank sponsors should emphasize several basic principles.23 Most savers are concerned primarily about the security and liquidity of their deposits. They are also concerned about the transaction costs involved in making deposits and in withdrawing funds. A postal savings system, for example, that forces savers to wait several weeks after request for withdrawal to receive funds will be shunned by depositors. Likewise, waiting in long queues to make small deposits or to withdraw small amounts discourages depositors.

7.29 Micro-savers are more sensitive to quality of service than they are to returns on deposits. Nonetheless, they will not deposit significant amounts if the returns are negative in real terms. The rates of interest paid on deposits must be higher than the expected rate of inflation.

7.30 Providing attractive deposit services is not easy. Accepting deposits increases the workload in financial institutions. Typically, there are a larger number of transactions associated with deposit accounts than there are with loan accounts. Combined with the substantial increase in number of deposit clients, this adds to the data processing problems in deposit takers. Deposits must be posted quickly and clients must be able to make immediate withdrawals from most of their deposit accounts. These two requirements force the intermediary to have cash on hand, which, in turn, leads to security problems.

23 See Ledgerwood, Chapter 6 for further discussion of the design of microdeposit products.

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7.31 Deposits also increase other problems for managers. Typically, there are seasonal ebbs and flows in rural deposits that force managers of intermediaries to deal with transferring excess liquidity in some periods and drawing on outside liquidity in other periods. Matching term structures between loans and deposits is a further problem faced by these managers.

7.32 Three general approaches might be used to mobilize deposits. The first is to focus on reforming or expanding financial organizations that are already licensed to accept deposits. This might include encouraging banks to open new branches in rural areas or reforming postal savings systems. The second approach is to add deposit taking in organizations that have experience in making rural loans. The third approach is to promote new organizations that have the capability of doing both lending and deposit taking, such as credit unions (see Westley and Branch; de Stemper).

7.33 In some cases, banks are discouraged or prohibited from opening rural branches by regulation or by hefty legal reserve requirements. These constraints might be addressed through an ADB project. In other cases, reforming banks that have substantial numbers of rural branches may be another way of boosting deposit mobilization in rural areas.24

7.34 A number of countries in Africa have postal savings systems that once provided useful deposit services in rural areas. An advantage of these systems is that they have post offices and a mail delivery system that allows deposits to be mobilized at little additional cost. Their main disadvantage has been the inability to provide depositors with the liquidity they often desire. Perhaps helping to reform some of these systems to make them more attractive sources of deposit services is an area the Bank could look into. (See Box 7.)

Box Number 7, Savings Bank of Madagascar (SBM)

The Postal Administration in Madagascar accepted deposits from 1918 to 1985; and it was then reformed into the Savings Bank of Madagascar (Caisse d’epargne Madagascar) in 1985 with 46 postal offices. Financial supervision was by the Ministry of Finance, while the Ministry of Post and Telecommunication exercised technical supervision. By June 1996, SBM was operating out of 174 windows located in both cities and small towns.

SBM provides its clients with savings services only, and based on the time of deposits, interest is paid on these savings (accrued interest is calculated annually on the account balance for each depositor). The bank focuses on poor clients, and its savings balance per client in1996 averaged US$32, representing about 28 percent of GDP per capita. By June 1996, the total number of clients was more than 370 thousand, of which almost half were women.

Source: Abstracted from Fitchett.

24 The reform of the Units portion of the Bank Bakyat Indonesia is an example of this approach.

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7.35 As discussed in the next section on prudential regulation, promotion of deposit taking in non-traditional financial institutions is problematic. In most countries, only institutions that are licensed to do so can legally accept deposits. Helping non-traditional institutions to become licensed may require waiting until they are creditworthy themselves, and this is usually a long-term goal. Nonetheless, where feasible, the Bank could help regulatory agencies establish procedures for institutions to qualify for deposit-taking licenses and also assist them to become creditworthy.25

7.36 The credit union model offers a third approach. Some countries in Africa once had credit unions or credit co-operatives that had a significant presence in rural areas. At least in Kenya, floundering credit co-operatives have been successfully reformed (Westley and Branch, pp. 129-134). The growth of healthy credit unions recently in Benin and Togo is also an indication that credit unions have promise in Africa (de Stemper; Tounessi). These small co-operatives have several advantages in deposit taking. Members contribute most of the initial share capital and this lessens concerns about prudential regulation and supervision. Members are also expected to monitor the operations of the co-operative to assure that their share capital and voluntary deposits are managed prudently. The Bank could, therefore, consider promoting the reform and development of credit unions in rural areas.

Prudential Regulation

7.37 In most cases, allowing financial institutions to mobilize deposits when these organizations are not prudentially regulated and supervised is an unwise policy. It is one thing to dispense loans with some altruistic motives, but it is quite a different thing to allow an organization to solicit poor peoples’ savings and then tolerate careless management of these funds. Any Bank-assisted rural finance project that includes deposit mobilization, therefore, should assess the capability of the regulatory system and, if necessary, strengthen its capacity. This may involve doing co-projects with other donors who are working on the supervision and regulation system.26

7.38 The regulatory problem might be divided into two segments (CGAP, 2000). The first segment involves a central monetary authority granting permission for an organization to accept deposits. The second segment involves prudentially regulating and supervising the organization after it begins to mobilize deposits from the public.

7.39 In most countries, there are minimum thresholds that financial organizations must meet before they are licensed to accept public deposits. This includes minimum

25 Regulatory agencies in Bolivia and Peru, with assistance from the Inter-American Development Bank, have developed new regulations that allow qualified non-traditional institutions to qualify more easily as deposit takers. 26 It is difficult to enhance the capacity of agencies that do prudential regulation and supervision because trained people often find more attractive employment elsewhere, including in banks that are being reformed by the regulatory agency.

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capital requirements, maintaining elaborate loan files, and being subject to independent external audits. Typically, only banks and other relatively large financial institutions can meet these requirements. In some countries authorities are allowing a few non-traditional financial institutions to mobilize deposits after they have been licensed as banks or after they meet requirements specially tailored for microfinance institutions. Understandably, banks and bank regulators are seldom eager to adjust requirements downward for licenses to mobilize deposits. Banks resist encouraging competition, and overworked regulators are not eager to add to their workload.

7.40 There are two primary justifications for prudential regulation and supervision, namely, first, to protect depositors, and second, to defend the overall financial system. In large measure, finance operates on trust. If any significant bank fails, it can threaten the survival of the entire banking and financial system. Bank regulators, as a result, must concentrate their attention on the largest elements of the financial market. In most low-income countries, bank regulators who are fully occupied in dealing with stressed banks have little capacity or desire to regulate small organizations that might mobilize deposits in rural areas.

7.41 The capacity to regulate is not the only limitation. In many countries the existing regulatory system is tailored to deal with banks and is not well suited to supervising organizations that are on the fringe of the formal financial system (Von Pischke). Procedures used to regulate banks are often too costly and cumbersome to extend to non-traditional deposit mobilizers. Innovations may be needed to extend some measure of regulation to cover non-traditional deposit takers. These might include giving an organization permission to accept deposits from the public but also requiring a large amount of transparency in the operation of the organizations in the form of understandable statements on interest payments, regularly published audited financial statements, and published information about insider borrowing. Another option is to license an organization to accept payments for redeposit in a financial institution that is prudentially regulated (see CGAP, 2000).

7.42 In some countries it may be possible to use an ADB project to encourage those elements of the financial system that are already prudentially regulated to expand into rural areas. Branching regulations, for example, may discourage banks from opening rural offices where the primary objective is to mobilize deposits. Likewise, hefty legal reserve requirements may discourage banks from seeking new depositors in rural areas. Similar attention might be given to reforming or strengthening postal savings systems or credit unions in rural areas.

7.43 Finally, in remote areas where it is impractical to extend prudential regulation, it may be necessary for regulators to ignore non-traditional organizations that accept deposits. Although risky, depositors may prefer to hold their savings in these types of organizations compared to other alternatives available to them.

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Evaluation

7.44 Rural finance projects established under the new paradigm require justifications and evaluations that are quite different from projects designed under directed credit programs. Directed credit projects were justified by what they did to borrowers. Accordingly, evaluations of these projects focused on measuring what borrowers did after receiving loans.

7.45 Under the new paradigm, the attention shifts from what borrowers are doing with their loans to how well the financial intermediaries, that provide financial products and services to people of modest means, are performing. The underlying rationale is that as long as the rural financial intermediaries are operating efficiently, there is a greater likelihood that the rural financial services they provide can be sustained over the long term.

7.46 In the old paradigm, there was a pre-occupation (too much emphasis) with access to cheap credit to the relative neglect of the sustainability of the services provided through the agricultural development banks. Thus, massive amounts of money were channeled through these banks for on-lending to the poor at fairly low interest rates, without addressing the question of how long such cheap credits could be sustained. The shift in focus is, therefore, necessary to ensure a “sustainable access”, of the rural dwellers, to credit and other financial services. Proponents of the new paradigm also argue that borrowers indirectly indicate the usefulness of improved financial services by repaying their loans, requesting for new loans, and by augmenting their deposit savings.

7.47 Two major advantages of the new type of evaluations are obvious. First, information used in the new evaluations is the exact information that has to be collected by any well-managed financial institution as a normal part of their business.27 Thus, the new evaluation method, unlike the old method, does not impose additional costs on the financial intermediaries. In short, the type of secondary information gathered is much less costly for evaluators to assemble than the primary data needed to evaluate borrower activities. The second advantage is that encouraging the participating organization to provide this type of information reinforces good management practices. As was mentioned earlier, under the directed credit paradigm, lenders were required to collect information that was not useful in managing an efficient financial intermediary, thereby increasing their transaction costs.28

7.48 Under the new paradigm, two broad measures of performance are paramount. The first is the sustainability of the financial infrastructure being assisted. The two key questions to be address here include:

27 See Ledgerwood, Chapter 8 for guidelines on how to establish proper financial statements for microfinance projects.28 The primary problem with collecting this type of detailed information on the characteristics of borrowers, their activities, and what loans were used for, is that it adds to the agency’s transaction costs. Typically, each line of credit from a donor or government carried idiosyncratic information and reporting requirements. It was not unusual for an agricultural development bank to collect separate information on thirty or forty lines of directed credit.

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Is it likely to endure, to become more efficient, and to be able to persist without subsidies within a reasonable period of time?

Will the organization being assisted likely provide sustained financial services to people of modest means long after the project is completed?

7.49 The second broad measure of performance is outreach. The key question here is:

Did the project assist the organization providing financial services to extend a substantial number of new loans to people of modest means, or

Did it assist the organization in providing attractive deposit services to a much larger number of people?29

It is, of course, important to know if the organization maintained its outreach after the project terminated.

Sustainability Measures

7.50 Sustainability can be measured in three ways, namely through:

(a) measures of loan recovery performance,

(b) measures of subsidy dependence, and through

(c) standard measures of financial institution performance such as CAMEL.

7.51 Loan recovery: Nothing shortens the life of a lending agency more quickly than failure to recover most of its loans. A hallmark of a carefully managed lender is the availability of up-to-date and accurate loan recovery information. A clear and timely picture of loan recovery status must involve several measures. Depending on the characteristics of the loan portfolio in question, some loan recovery measures may be quite misleading. Increases or decreases in the overall loan portfolio, the term structure of the portfolio, and loan refinancing can all have major effects on the usefulness of various loan recovery measures.

7.52 For example, a lender may be rapidly expanding its loan portfolio and extending numerous loans that are relatively long term. In this case, the ratio of loans-not-repaid-on-time to total-value-of-loans-made would likely substantially underestimate future loan recovery problems. The usefulness of all loan recovery measures are diluted where lenders are refinancing or rolling over loans that are not repaid on time.

29 Financial organizations that lend as well as collect deposits typically have 8 to 15 depositor clients for each of their borrowers. This ratio holds in banks, credit unions, and even in informal self-help financial groups.

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7.53 The reliability of loan recovery measures also may be compromised by employee incentive formula or by the motivations lending agencies have to report high levels of loan recovery. If the compensation of loan officers is tied to loan recovery performance they may mask recovery problems by refinancing loans. Likewise, lending agencies whose loan recovery performance is under scrutiny by donors or government may hide difficulties by selecting measures that understate their default problems.30

7.54 Historically, loan recovery problems are submerged in new or rapidly expanding programs. The expansion and the presence of term loans may result in relatively few loans coming due compared to the total number of loans outstanding. If the lender has altruistic objectives, it may have strong incentives to refinance or roll over loans not repaid on time. Typically, the severity of loan recovery problems does not become apparent for several years until the growth in the portfolio slows and the lender decides not to further refinance problematic loans.

7.55 The two most useful measures of loan recovery status are the ratio of loans-paid-on-time to loans-coming-due and the aging of arrears. (See CGAP, 1999 for more details on measuring loan recovery rates.) Serious lenders should be able to generate information on these measures on demand. They should also have management information systems that provide this type of information daily to individual loan officers.

7.56 Subsidy dependency: Under the old paradigm, most lenders handling subsidized loans depended on subsidies to sustain their operations. When governments and donors alike realized that the bulk of the subsidy did not reach their intended beneficiaries, and also that they could not keep up with the infinite demand for cheap credit, their will to provide these subsidies decreased, and many of these subsidy-dependent intermediaries imploded or became moribund. Under the new paradigm financial intermediaries involved in helping poor people are expected to become subsidy independent in a reasonable amount of time31. Freedom from subsidies allows an organization to integrate into national financial and capital markets. Subsidy independence also allows the organization to become creditworthy in the eyes of other members of the financial system and to borrow from local capital markets.

7.57 The Subsidy Dependency Index (SDI) developed by Yaron is an efficient measure of the degree to which a financial institution depends on subsidies (see Appendix Number 5). The SDI can be calculated from information that any well-managed financial institution should have in its information system. The Index is useful to

30 At least one well-known microfinance institution uses an elastic loan recovery measure. It does not classify a loan as overdue until payments are at least 12 months overdue. In times of natural disaster the institution may lengthen this grace period to 24 months or more for accounting purposes. Using these elastic measures of loan recovery allows the institution consistently to report loan recovery rates in the high 90s.31 This is the time required to build up a financial intermediary to the point where it can sustain the services for which they were set up. During this period, subsidies to the intermediary must show a declining trend along with increasing financial viability of the intermediary.

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both donors and managers of financial organizations. It can be used as a management tool that measures the pace an organization is moving toward subsidy independence. Individual components of the Index also identify specific changes managers might make to decrease dependence on subsidies.

7.58 If a Bank project involves an ongoing financial institution, it may be appropriate to calculate a SDI for the organization before the project begins. The design of the project might include targets and timetables for reducing the dependency on subsidies.

7.59 CAMEL: To become sustainable, a micro-finance institution must become a respected financial intermediary that eventually conforms to the norms of other elements of the financial system. In simple terms, it must become creditworthy. 32

Building a reputation for being a serious intermediary requires maintaining transparency and being judged by standard measures. This is especially true for intermediaries that are collecting deposits or that hope to mature to the point where they may accept voluntary deposits or tap into regular capital markets for funds. A popular measure for rating the performance of financial institutions is CAMEL (and acronym for Capital, Assets, Management, Earnings, and Liquidity).33

7.60 The CAMEL was originally developed in 1978 to measure the soundness of U.S. commercial banks. Over time it has been increasingly used by regulators to compare and rank the performance of financial institutions, by bank mangers to evaluate their own performance, and by both bank managers and regulators to measure changes in performance over time. Recently ACCION International has used a modified CAMEL as a technique to help its affiliates to qualify for funds from capital markets.

7.61 During the design phase of a microfinance project, guidelines should be established to use the CAMEL34 to measure the ongoing performance of the organization handling the project. These measures should be of use to both managers of the institution handling the project and to the Bank’s Task Managers. Use of these guidelines should foster habits that allow the institution later to integrate into the regular financial system.

7.62 Definition: CAMEL is an organizing device that allows managers to address vital questions that are part of the financial systems perspective. It allows unambiguous answers to questions like the following:

Does the participating agency have any capital?

32 This section draws on the World Bank, “The World Bank and Microenterprise Finance: From Concept to Practice,” Washington, D. C. Operations Evaluations Department, June 29, 1999.33 For more details on CAMEL see Basle Committee on Banking Regulations and Supervision Practices. Also see Saltzman and others for information on the modified CAMEL system used by ACCION International in analyzing its Latin American affiliates. A slightly different evaluation system is used by the World Council of Credit Unions (WOOCU) and is referred to by its acronym PEARLS.34 See Ledgerwood, Chapter 10 for more details on this topic.

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Is the agency making provisions for bad debt?

Does the agency have a management plan? And

Does the plan help direct the operations of the agency?

Does the agency have plans for how it will mobilize funds in the future?

Paying attention to the types of information contained in the CAMEL analysis will enhance the chances that the agency handling the microfinance project persists. The primary weakness of CAMEL, from the perspective of microfinance, is that it does not include any measure of outreach.

7.63 The five areas examined by CAMEL are the most important ones in the operation of a financial institution.35 These five areas capture the financial condition and operating strength of the institution. The primary information in each of the five measures in CAMEL is briefly summarized as follows:

Capital adequacy (C) documents the capital position of the institution, its capacity to support growth in lending, and any deterioration in assets. It also provides insight into the institution’s ability to raise additional equity in the case of losses, along with its ability to establish reserves to cover possible loses.

Asset quality (A) documents the overall quality of the loan portfolio and other assets. This includes an analysis of the part of the loan portfolio-at-risk and the amount that might be subject to write off.

Management (M) describes the institution’s human resource policy, quality of management, quality of the management information system, internal controls and auditing, and strategic planning.

Earnings (E) captures information on costs and revenues, operational efficiency, interest rate policies, along with return on equity and return on asset measures.

The liquidity (L) component reflects the ability of the institution to meet future funding needs and credit demand. The liability structure and the productivity of its current assets are also includes in this measure.

Outreach

7.64 A micro-finance project which recovers most of its loans and which becomes subsidy independent but reaches only a few hundred clients does little to ameliorate poverty. A project may start small, but if it is to realize outreach, it must expand to have thousands of clients. If the project is to develop or

35 This section draws heavily on Saltzman and others.

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strengthen a specialized micro-lender, the first measure of outreach is the number of borrowers. A second measure of outreach is the number of repeat borrowers. Not all borrowers can benefit from a second or third loan, but the willingness of a large percentage of borrowing clients to sustain relationships with the lender is a strong indication that the lender is providing valuable services.36

7.65 If the project is to develop a combination of micro-loans and micro-deposits, or to promote deposit mobilization alone, the number of depositors is the first indicator that should be used to measure deposit outreach. In some cases, however, agencies that provide both loan and deposit services may inflate the number of deposit accounts by forcing new borrowers to open nominal savings accounts. Borrowers may view these accounts as an added cost of borrowing and fail to add to their account later unless forced to do so. It is, therefore, also useful to use a second measure that documents the number of depositors who have active accounts.

Synopsis of Guidelines

7.66 The purpose of a rural finance project should be to build or enhance rural financial infrastructure that provides sustained financial services to a large number of poor people.

7.67 Three steps should be taken before designing the project. First, determine if the economic-cum-social environment is hospitable for a project. Second, determine if there is any unfair competition that might adversely affect the project. Third, where feasible, conduct a financial sector study that: (a) provides a rationale for the project; (b) helps identify institutions within the country that can participate in the project; and (c) identifies micro-financial products and services that might be provided by the project.

7.68 The most important step in the design phase of the project is to select or to develop financial institutions that have a high probability of becoming successful. These institutions must be capable of attaining substantial outreach while becoming sustainable without persistent subsidies. Outreach and sustainability can only be achieved if: (a) transaction costs are minimized; (b) the bulk of the loans are repaid; and (c) the costs of business are recovered by charging adequate rates of interest on loans. If inflation is a problem, interest rates must be high enough to protect the purchasing power of the loan portfolio.

7.69 Unfortunately, loan guarantee schemes do not appear to be an effective way of dealing with the risks involved in microlending. On the one hand, they are supposed to protect micro-lending institutions from loan defaults. But at the same

36 A caveat should be kept in mind when looking at gross number of borrowers. If the agency involved in the microfinance project is dispensing subsidies it may attract clients who are subsidy seekers. If the subsidies are large, the agency may attract clients who were previously borrowers from other non-subsidized microlenders. The number of borrowers attracted by subsidies to the project from other lenders should be netted out of outreach figures.

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time, the guarantees they provide can serve as a disincentive to the collection efforts of financial intermediaries Successful micro-lenders must, therefore, develop collateral substitutes, efficient information systems, and high quality services to overcome risk related problems. Borrowers are more likely to repay loans when they place a high value on maintaining a relationship with the lender than when they view loan services as mediocre.

7.70 Projects that involve deposit mobilization likewise must emphasize quality of service. Deposit facilities must be located near depositors, offer quick services, guarantee security, and provide attractive rewards to savers. Project designers also should assure that prudential regulation and supervision is adequate to protect the interests of depositors. If this is not the case, part of the project should focus on enhancing these capabilities.

7.71 The final step in project design is a careful listing of the measures that will be used to evaluate the success or failure of the project. The measures should concentrate on the performance of the financial institution(s) that are participating in the project. The indicators should show the extent to which sustainability and outreach is achieved. Some of any short-term subsidies involved in the project should be tied to reaching intermediate goals that eventually lead to sustainability and outreach.

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APPENDICES

Appendix Number 1: CREDIT-IMPACT STUDIES

Two methods have been used to evaluate the performance of rural finance projects. The traditional approach focuses on the impact of loan use on borrowers' activities, the topic discussed in this appendix. A newer, second approach concentrates on changes in the performance of financial institutions involved in development projects, a topic discussed elsewhere in the text. Most donor credit projects lead to impact studies because these projects were initially justified by predictions of what the project would do for selected target groups or to targeted activities. This might involve measuring how much more wheat was produced, how many more animals were raised, how incomes were changed, and how much more employment was caused by the borrowing.

Impact Studies

One of two methods is generally employed in credit-impact studies. One is a before-and-after design where changes in borrower performance are measured over time -- before receiving loans and sometime after receiving loans. The second method uses a with-and-without design and compares the performance of borrowers with a similar control group that receives no loans under the program.

Credit-impact studies have two advantages: they complement targeted credit programs, and those funding development projects understand and expect impact studies. As a result, it is easy to attract funds to do this type of analysis, and funding for impact studies sometimes is built into rural finance projects. Nonetheless, these types of studies also have major weaknesses. They are time consuming and costly to do because researchers must collect relatively large amounts of primary information from borrowers on a variety of activities. Even more important, these studies are plagued by methodological problems.

Methodological problems

Those who do credit-impact studies face extremely difficult methodological problems. For example, before-and-after studies suffer from the attribution problem where borrower activities may be affected by variables other than the loans provided by the project. An example is where borrowers' incomes increase because product prices rose concurrently with the unfolding of the rural finance project. Studies that use this methodology often overestimate the benefits caused by loan use when the researcher is unable to control or isolate the effects of other factors that are also changing with loan use.

With-and-without studies also involve selection bias. If a credit program has integrity, it screens applicants for creditworthiness with those being most creditworthy receiving loans. Screening makes it difficult to form control groups that are identical to

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the borrowing group. Ideally, a credit program should select individuals who have the highest returns to investments and screen out those with the lowest. Done correctly, credit programs lend to individuals who likely would perform better economically, even without loans, than those who are screened out of the lending program. Part of the difference in performance between borrowers and non-borrowers, therefore, may be because of initial differences in capabilities. Ignoring the selection bias results in overestimation of the benefits of loan use.

A further problem is that financial intermediation involves lending and deposit mobilization. Credit impact studies focus only on lending. In an efficient financial market a much larger number of individuals benefit from attractive deposit services than benefit from borrowing. An ill-conceived credit project such as one that offers cheap loans, for example, may seriously damage the ability and willingness of a financial institution to mobilize deposits. The damage done to the interests of actual or potential depositors by a targeted credit program ought to be part of the cost-benefit analysis of such programs, but seldom is. Credit impact studies routinely ignore costs imposed on depositors.

Fungibility presents still more problems for credit-impact studies. Funds from one's savings, from an informal loan, from a formal loan, or from remittances are completely interchangeable. Any good that can be sold is also a partial substitute for money, as is any good used in barter. Fungibility, as a result, makes it extremely difficult to measure accurately the additionality in borrower activities caused by a project loan.

At the borrower level, it is also difficult to answer the counterfactual question: what would borrowers have done without program loans? Would they have used some of their own funds, informal loans, remittances, or sold assets to make most or all of the investments made with funds provided by project loans? Any loan allows individuals to substitute borrowed funds for other funds or for barter, and this is nearly impossible to measure. Ignoring fungibility, substitution, and the counterfactual problem likewise results in inflated estimates of credit project benefits.

Most credit impact studies ignore the wear and tear credit projects impose on financial infrastructure. One NGO, for example, may provide cheap credit that undermines the financial integrity of another organization that is attempting to attract creditworthy borrowers who are required to pay market rates of interest. Likewise, a credit project may impose administrative costs on the agency handling the loans that are not covered by subsidies and revenues. These costs might include but would not be limited to reports and evaluations, for example. Or, a credit program that tolerates loan defaults may undermine the ability of other segments of the financial system to collect loans.

Finally, credit impact studies also ignore non-borrower losses that some may suffer because of borrower gains. For example, a credit project may provide loans and new technology to poor individuals that allow them to sharply increase their production of candles. This additional supply of candles, however, may drive even poorer candle makers from the local market.

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Appendix Number 2: TRANSACTION COSTS

Transaction costs have a major impact on the performance of financial markets, especially regarding microfinance. These costs fall into two broad categories: the opportunity cost of time spent by borrowers and depositors as they negotiate financial contracts and the explicit expenses incurred by all participants to form, to fulfill, and to enforce these obligations. Total transaction costs can be subdivided into the costs incurred by the five major categories of participants in financial markets: borrowers, depositors, lenders, deposit mobilizers, and supervison-regulators.

Costs for Participants

Borrowers' costs include the value of time spent soliciting, negotiating, withdrawing, and repaying loan. They also include costs for trips to deal with the lender, costs of providing suitable collateral, out-of-pocket costs for preparing loan documents, gratuities for co-signers, possible bribes or broker's fees to influence lenders’ decisions, the opportunity costs involved in compensatory balances, and other expenses incurred in sustaining and enhancing the borrower’s creditworthiness. A borrower's cost to secure a loan -- the perceived price of the loan -- is the sum of these transaction costs plus the nominal interest payment made for the loan.

Depositors' costs involve the opportunity cost of time spent in searching for savings alternatives, in making deposits and withdrawals, along with any associated transportation expense. The net return that savers realize on their deposits is equal to the interest received on deposits less the transaction costs incurred by depositors.

Lenders' transaction costs mostly stem from gathering and processing information required to screen potential borrowers, processing loans and associated collateral, monitoring loans, loan collecting or seizing collateral, and in meeting regulatory requirements. Lenders incur these expenses largely because of the risks involved in lending. The net returns from lending equals interest paid on the loan less the lender's loan transaction costs, less the cost of funds lent, less loan losses, less the lender's costs of submitting to prudential regulation.

Deposit mobilization also imposes transaction costs on deposit mobilizers: deposit documents must be issued, transactions handled, records kept, and reserve requirements met. For a financial intermediary that relieson deposits and equity capital for lending the cost of funds equals the interest on deposits, the dividend paid on equity, the transaction costs of sustaining this activity, and the costs of submitting to any prudential regulation.

Prudential regulation

In financial institutions that mobilize deposits, there is a public interest in guarding these funds from theft and malfeasance. This leads to deposit guarantees and

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prudential regulation, both of which typically impose transaction costs on financial institutions. Intermediaries may be forced to pay insurance premiums and also to incur additional costs because of examination and regulation. The total regulatory costs are equal to the regulatory costs imposed on the lender, the regulatory costs imposed on the deposit mobilizer, plus the costs of operating regulatory organizations.

Transactions Costs and Rationing

Transaction costs are not allocated in fixed proportions among participants. New and non-preferred clients usually incur higher transaction costs for a given financial product than do previous or preferred clients. These costs per unit of transaction for both the financial intermediary and the client generally decline when working relationships mature, when the size of the financial transaction increases, and when the financial system becomes more efficient.

Research has shown that the allocation of these costs among the four categories of participants, among individuals in each category, and the sum total of all transaction costs is strongly influenced by financial market policies and by other government and donor actions. In many cases reallocated transaction costs partially substitute for interest rates in the rationing of financial services. For example, governments may impose interest rate ceilings on loans. These rates are often below commercial rates and sometimes below the expected rates of inflation. This generates excess demand and forces lenders to devise substitutes for interest rates to perform the credit rationing function. One common alternative is for lenders to shift part of their normal loan transaction cost to non-preferred clients, or to create additional hurdles that non-preferred clients must overcome to access subsidized funds. Forcing new borrowers and borrowers of small amounts to stand in line, to make numerous trips to the bank to transact a loan, to pay for a bank technician to visit their farms, and to pay for loan application forms are all signs of this reallocation of transaction costs.

Why do banks do this? Rather than being a nefarious plot to exclude poor people from formal loans, it is the normal reaction of any firm that is trying to maximize its returns by limiting its costs. The bank would have absorbed at least some of the transaction costs for the non-preferred borrowers through hiring more loan officers, by expanding the size of the branch, and by simplifying its procedures for non-preferred clients if interest rates are allowed to play a larger role in loan rationing.

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Costs Generated by Loan Targeting

Loan targeting occurs when donors or governments provide funds to lenders that must be lent for specified purposes. To assure compliance with lending targets the providers of funds usually require detailed reports on borrowers and loans and then later require credit-impact studies. In some cases this might involve a bank maintaining separate records on dozens of targeted lending programs. Loan quotas, loan size ceilings, and loan guarantee funds are other techniques that governments use to force lenders to allocate loans in particular ways. These programs increase transaction costs.

Relative importance

The relative importance of transaction costs in influencing behavior among participants varies substantially. Because the normal costs for a lender to negotiate a loan is more or less fixed, lenders prefer to deal mostly with large loans that involve a small ratio of lender transaction costs to total value of loan. For both borrowers and depositors the importance of transaction costs varies inversely with the size of the loan or deposit. The transaction cost component of borrower's costs and the net benefit for depositors usually decrease as the size of the transaction increases. Borrowers and depositors of small amounts therefore will be quite sensitive to changes in transaction costs, while borrowers and depositors of large amounts will be more strongly influenced by changes in interest rates.

The behavior of the lender and deposit mobilizer is influenced by both interest rates and transaction costs. A financial intermediary has weak incentives to provide financial services to new rural clients who are poor because of the naturally high transaction costs the intermediary incurs in dealing with these clients. Enforcing low interest rates on loans along with extensive loan targeting that increases the lender's costs exacerbates this tendency. Low interest rates generate an excess demand that typically causes the lender to off-load additional transaction costs on non-preferred borrowers. As a result, borrowers who are relatively well-to-do receive the bulk of the cheap loans while the effective borrowing costs for poor people may be increased because of the imposition on them of higher transaction costs. "Cheap credit" ends up not being cheap for poor people under these circumstances because of the reallocation of transaction costs.

Reducing Total Transaction Costs

Other things being equal, total transaction costs per unit of funds handled decrease as the size of the transaction increases, as the distance from urban areas decreases, and as the amount of regulation or targeting decreases. Transaction costs are a major reason why it is so difficult to provide small loans to clients in rural areas. They are also a major explanation for the tendency of formal financial systems to concentrate activities in urban areas and among individuals who are relatively well-to-do. This tendency can only be changed if significant reductions are made in total transaction costs, especially those costs incurred by the financial intermediary.

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Transaction costs can be reduced several ways. One important way is through scale economies when the staff and facilities of the intermediary are used more efficiently to handle a larger volume of business. Another way of reducing transaction costs is through scope economies where an intermediary uses staff and facilities more efficiently by providing multiple financial services. Because financial contracts depend heavily on information, transaction costs are sensitive to technologies that alter the efficiency of collecting and processing information. Computers play a key role in reducing these costs. Dealing with groups may be still another technique for reducing transaction costs, both in lending and deposit mobilization.

Financial innovations

New financial technology can sprout virtually anywhere. Financial innovations are also unique in that they are not always cost reducing. Formal financial intermediaries are especially creative in designing ways to mitigate the impact of policy restrictions when it is in their best interest to do so. These innovations, however, may increase the total costs of financial intermediation. For example, a bank may avoid the intent of loan-size limits by issuing multiple loans to the same firm or individual, thereby increasing overall transaction costs. Unfortunately, in financial systems that are heavily regulated and in which extensive loan targeting occurs, much of the innovative energy in formal finance is spent in mining the loopholes in rules and regulations rather than in searching for new procedures that reduce overall transaction costs.

Despite its undeserved, unsavory reputation, informal finance is a major hatchery for cost-reducing financial technologies. In large part, informal finance succeeds in providing sustained financial services to large numbers of poor people in rural areas because of the cost-reducing innovations that are spawned by competition among informal agents. Programs that are successful in providing financial services to large numbers of poor clients also must control and reduce these important costs.

Source: Adapted from Adams, 1995

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Appendix Number 3: MARKET RATES OF INTEREST

Although the term “market rates of interest” is widely used in ADB rural finance projects, the meaning of the term is ambiguous. In part, the ambiguity stems from confusion about the nature of financial products. Casual observers often assume that all loans are essentially the same product and that if financial markets are working efficiently, all debt should carry the same market-clearing interest rate, the so-called "market rate of interest." The fundamental problem with this view is that it glosses over the huge variety of loan contracts that are produced by these markets.

Analogously comparing the term loans to the term fruit may clarify the loan-contract notion. The term fruit covers a large number of distinct crops as different as tomatoes, mangos, and bananas. The price of each type of fruit is determined largely independently by the interplay of supply and demand forces. Furthermore, there may be a range of prices that consumers are willing to pay for sub-varieties of fruit or for quality differences.

Similar differences exist in the varieties of loans. A small loan that is made without imposing transaction costs on the borrower, that involves no physical collateral, and which has highly flexible repayment terms is one of these varieties. A completely different variety is a commercial loan that is large, which imposes substantial loan transaction costs on the borrower, which requires significant physical collateral, and which has inflexible repayment conditions. Likewise, loans obtained by using a credit card are viewed by borrowers as substantially different loan contracts from a 30-year mortgage involved in the purchase of a home. One could not logically expect that these vastly different loan contracts -- different in costs to produce and different in borrowers' satisfaction -- should carry the same price.

Instead of using the term “market rates of interest” when referring to the pricing of loans to end users, one more appropriately may use the term “cost recovery rates.” Applying this term forces program administrators to analyze more carefully their costs and to compare these costs with their revenues. This, in turn, would allow policy makers and administrators of these organizations to measure their movement toward, or away from, subsidy independence.

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Appendix Number 4: LOAN GUARANTEE PROGRAMS

Loan guarantee schemes have been used in many countries to stimulate lending, especially for small-business operators. Although justifications of loan guarantee programs typically begin with reference to one or more financial market imperfections, there is rarely any detailed analysis along these lines. In the absence of documentation of financial market imperfections and a cogent argument that shows the loan guarantee scheme will overcome these imperfections, the merits of these programs must be based on estimates of their benefits and costs.

Costs of Loan Guarantee Programs

At least three important questions should be asked about loan guarantee programs in assessing their effectiveness and efficiency in reaching small-scale borrowers: Do these programs significantly alter lender behavior in desired directions? Are the costs of these programs less than their benefits? Could the resources committed to loan guarantee schemes be more effective in

assisting disadvantaged groups if they were used in other programs?

Three categories of costs accompany loan guarantee programs: the costs of setting up the program, the costs of funding the subsidy needed to energize and sustain the program, and the additional cost incurred by the financial system to run and to participate in the guarantee program.

Set-up costs: In many cases, establishing a loan guarantee scheme involves setting up a new organization or a new office in an existing organization to administer the program. Typically, donors or governments cover all or most of the costs of setting up these facilities.

Periodic Subsidies: Most loan guarantee programs require hefty subsidies to sustain their operations. The subsidies may come via grants or concessionary priced loans to replenish the scheme.

Transaction costs: In addition to the obvious costs incurred by the guaranteeing agency to operate its program, lenders and borrowers usually incur additional transaction costs to participate in the program. In extreme cases, the guaranteeing agency may insist on receiving copies of loan documents on insured loans and then essentially duplicate the initial loan screening done by lenders. In some cases, borrowers of insured loans may be required to provide additional information to lenders over what is required on non-insured loans, and lenders usually have to prepare special reports on their portion of their loan portfolio covered by loan guarantees.

Lenders also incur additional transaction costs when they make claims on loans covered by guarantee programs. These transaction costs may be substantial in cases of dispute with the guaranteeing agency and when the lender participates in several guarantee programs and is processing information manually.

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Benefits of Loan Guarantee Schemes

The benefits generated by a loan guarantee program are concentrated in the additional lending induced by the transfer of part of the lender's loan recovery risk to the guaranteeing organization. Both borrowers and society benefit from the increases in net income realized by borrowers who were supposedly more severely credit rationed before the help of the loan guarantee program. Unfortunately, these increases in net income can be viewed only vaguely through loan recovery performance. Borrowers are more likely to repay loans that help them significantly increase their incomes. Additional net incomes can occur only if additional borrowers receive loans because of the incentives provided to lenders by loan guarantee programs.

Additionality: Loan guarantee programs are justified on the basis of altering lenders' decisions in directions favored by designers of the guarantee scheme. The success of these programs, therefore, hinges on the extent to which guarantees cause additional lending to targeted groups, additional meaning more lending than would have occurred without the guarantee. If the program causes additionality, subsidiary issues are the comparisons of the program's costs with estimated benefits, and whether similar benefits could be achieved through less expensive methods. In the absence of additionality, the subsidiary issues are moot.

In evaluations of credit guarantee programs, additionality often is measured poorly or ignored. In most cases, the number of borrowers covered by the guarantee and the total value of their guaranteed loans are used as gross estimates of program benefits. These numbers, however, likely overstate the impact of loan guarantees on lender behavior. In evaluating the merits of loan guarantees from this perspective, the primary question to be answered is an empirical one, not one of theory: did the guarantee scheme induce lenders to augment targeted lending and if so, by how much? Additionality might be expressed either in terms of number of clients, number of loans, or in terms of volume of funds lent for targeted purposes.

Simple examples may clarify the notion of additionality. Assume the purpose of a loan guarantee program is to stimulate lending to microenterpreneurs. Further assume that before the availability of the guarantee scheme, lender X was making loans to 10 microentrepreneurs for a total of $1,000. If, after participating in the loan guarantee program, lender X lent to 20 micro-entrepreneurs a total of $2,000, one could conclude that the loan guarantee was associated with additionality in both number of loans and value of loans to the target group.

Counterfactual: It is impossible to know with precision, however, what the lender would have done in the absence of the loan guarantee program. This is an event that did not occur and is therefore impossible to measure. One might argue that lender X, mentioned in the example above, would have increased its lending to micro-entrepreneurs by the same amounts without the loan guarantee. Reforms, for example, that created an economic environment more hospitable to micro-enterprises might have induced the lender to expand micro-enterprise lending without additional guarantees. One must be cautious in attributing all changes in lending behavior to loan guarantee

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schemes when the guarantee program is nested in a bundle of programs that are improving the environment for a targeted group or activity.

Substitution: Measuring the impact of loan guarantees on lender behavior is further complicated by two types of substitution: that which occurs within the lending institution and that which occurs among lenders. A loan guarantee program, for example, may cause a bank to transfer part or all of the qualifying portion of its existing loan portfolio to the guarantee programs, and then expand its lending in non-targeted areas. This might be called intra-portfolio substitution. Large amounts of substitution diminish additionality, and this is likely to occur when the objectives of the loan guarantee are perceived by lenders to be undesirable or unprofitable activities.

The second form of substitution, inter-lender substitution, occurs among lenders. For example, one organization may have access to a loan guarantee program that allows it to provide loans on a more favorable basis to borrowers than is possible for other lenders to do. The organization subsidized through the loan guarantee as a result may draw clients from other lenders. If all of the borrowers covered by a loan guarantee program were previously clients of other lenders, little or no additionality in number of clients might result from the guarantee when net changes in the entire financial sector are considered.

Overlooking the problems of substitution and the counterfactual could lead casual observers to conclude that a credit guarantee program had a major impact on lender behavior when in fact the guarantee caused much less additionality in lending for targeted purposes. Several studies in Canada and in the United Kingdom suggest that loan guarantee programs there resulted in only one-quarter to one-third of the clients covered by the guarantees being additional. Studies of loan guarantee programs in Latin America and the Philippines found even less additionality.

Given the difficulties of measuring additionality, evaluations of loan guarantee programs rarely present information on this vital measure of performance. Lacking evidence showing loan guarantee programs caused additionality, one cannot determine the benefits of these programs. Skeptics might go on to argue that only the costs of these programs can be determined with any precision.

Lessons

Four critical features stand out in this review of loan guarantee programs. The first is that the assumptions about credit market imperfections -- on which loan guarantee programs are often built -- and the design of these programs are seldom logically related. The second is that few if any of these programs can persist without subsidies. The third is that most evaluations of these programs report only part of the associated costs. The fourth is that benefits of these programs seldom are documented carefully, and additionality seldom is measured accurately. With only scraps of information available about costs and even skimpier amounts of reliable information on benefits, it is impossible to make informed judgments about the relationship between benefits and costs of these efforts. Until this type of information is available, perhaps it would be best for ADB to avoid loan guarantee programs.

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Source: Abstracted from Vogel and Adams, 1997a.

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Appendix Number 5: THE SUBSIDY DEPENDENCY INDEX

The Subsidy Dependency Index (SDI) measures the extent to which an organization must raise the interest rates it charges on its loans to achieve independence from subsidies. A ratio of 2.0, for example, indicates that interest rates must increase 200 percent to achieve subsidy independence.

Calculating the SDI

In order to calculate the SDI for a rural financial intermediary (RFI), all the implicit and explicit subsidies received by the RFI must be aggregated. Total subsidies are then compared with the RFI's average on-lending interest rate multiplied by its average annual loan portfolio (i.e., the interest earned as presented in the RFI's annual income statements.) The ratio of the RFI's annual subsidies to its annual interest income indicates the percentage by which that RFI's interest income would have to increase to eliminate the need for subsidies.

The SDI can be expressed in terms of the following formula:

SDI = Total annual explicit and implicit subsidies received (S) Average annual loan portfolio interest income (L*i)

= A(m - c) + (E*m) - P + K + RL*i

Where:A = Average annual outstanding concessionary borrowed funds

m = The interest rate the RFI would probably pay for borrowed funds if access to concessionary borrowed funds were to be eliminated. This would generally be the market reference deposit interest rate, adjusted for reserve requirements, and the administrative cost associated with mobilizing and servicing additional deposits.

c = Weighted average annual concessionary rate of interest actually paid by the RFI on its average annual outstanding concessionary borrowed funds.

E = Average annual equity

P = Reported annual profit before tax (adjusted for appropriate loan loss provisions and inflation).

K = The sum of all other annual subsidies received by the RFI, such as partial or complete coverage of the RFI's operational costs by the state.

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R = A downward adjustment in the loan portfolio income to account for the preferential reserve requirements imposed by the government on the lender.

L = Average annual outstanding loan portfolio of the RFI.

i = Weighted average on-lending interest rate on the RFI's loan portfolio.= Average interest earned

Average annual loan portfolio

Source: Yaron, et. al., 1997.

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Appendix Number 6: SUGGESTED STEPS FOR IMPLEMENTING

THE NEW PARADIGM

This Appendix outlines suggested steps that ADB might take in the short and medium-run to shift from the old paradigm to the new one on rural finance. The steps are presented in approximate order of time priority. Overall they focus largely on generating staff and administrative support for microfinance activities that might later be developed using the new paradigm on rural finance.

Even under the best of circumstances, large organizations and their employees typically change practices slowly and resist adopting new paradigms.37 The “tyranny of the status quo” is a restraint on redirection of effort in any organization. Bank employees may feel more comfortable working with traditional clients such as government institutions and development banks than they do with small, new, struggling organizations. It is far easier for employees to replicate previous rural lending practices – lines of credit and credit components – than it is to design new types of rural finance projects with non-traditional clients. Bank employees, therefore, must become convinced that new approaches are better than old practices before they will embrace the new paradigm. This involves acknowledging that projects designed using the old paradigm did not produce results that are consistent with the New Vision Statement of the bank -- helping to reduce rural poverty.38

To develop widespread for the new paradigm in ADB, the following steps might be taken:

Steps to raise awareness and acceptance:

Employees are unlikely to change practices without the board and key bank managers accepting and then sanctioning the new paradigm, followed by appropriate policy directives. In the World Bank, for example, a strong policy directive (O.P. 8.30) mandated major changes in the way the Bank addressed financial markets. Comparable directives were issued by the Inter-American Development Bank and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The ADB will need to issue something similar.

Hold seminars with leaders in the ADB to inform them about the proposed new policies. Solicit their formal approval of the new paradigm on rural finance.

After the new approach is accepted, prepare a policy directive that outlines what can and cannot be done under the new paradigm.

37 Prior to the adventures of Columbus, for example, the flat-earth paradigm was used to understand our planet. Even after more than 500 years, not all people have accepted the new paradigm that describes the earth as a sphere.38 Other major donors such as USAID, the World Bank, and the Inter-American Development Bank have gone through this process of switching paradigms. Although the switch in ADB might proceed more rapidly, other donors have taken up to 10 years to make the full conversion to the new paradigm.

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Steps to create institutional capacity:

Someone must be in charge of implementing the new paradigm. If this is done through AMINA, then someone with experience in microfinance should be designated or hired to head AMINA and the position should have some clout, resources, and prominence in the organizational structure of ADB.

Appoint new head of AMINA. Elevate the office of AMINA higher in the administrative structure Hire several specialists in microfinance to staff AMINA. At least one of these

specialists should focus on deposit mobilization. Place microfinance specialists in key operational offices in ADB Establish working relationships with international groups that specialize in

microfinance. Establish a budget for the office that supports microfinance efforts.

Designing and implementing model

Early in the process, the ADB must decide how it will identify, design, evaluate, and manage new rural finance projects. One model is to do most of this internally with bank staff. Another model is to rely on contractors to do most of the work with ADB staff focusing on assuring compliance with contract agreements.

Microfinance leaders in ADB might study the methods used by several major donors such as the U.S. Agency for International Development or the EBRD in their microfinance efforts.

ADB might also study some of the microfinance projects that were designed and managed by major agencies that are specialists in this topic. Some of the agencies that might be considered include ACCION International, several of the organizations that promote credit unions, and private consulting firms such as IPC in Frankfurt.

After discussions with other donors and implementing agencies, ADB should issue a policy directive on how it will deal with new rural finance projects.

Steps to build staff capacity:

As quickly as possible steps should be taken to expose interested ADB staff to successful microfinance programs. This can be done through staff visits to successful projects, short-course training programs, and helping staff to access new sources of information about microfinance. Providing staff with the opportunities to take brief leaves to study programs in other countries or to attend short-courses on microfinance may provide them incentives to make professional commitments to this area.

Arrange staff visits to several successful microfinance projects such as the Bank Rakyat in Indonesia, the Alexandria Businessmen’s Association in Egypt, KREP in Kenya, the new credit unions in Benin, or ADEMI in the Dominican Republic. (CGAP might help identify other useful sites to visit.)

Present short-term courses in Abidjan on microfinance for ADB staff. This might be done in the Joint African Institute. (Again, CGAP may be able to help with this.)

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Send several ADB staff to the microfinance course in Boulder, Colorado. (Contact Robert Christen in CGAP for help with admissions)

Send several ADB staff to Alexandria, Egypt to work in the microfinance program there, especially on data processing and management information systems.

Distribute new publications on microfinance to interested ADB staff and assist them to access electronic sources of information on microfinance.

Encourage staff to upgrade their English skills. (Unfortunately, a majority of the most useful information on microfinance is only available in English, including the discussions in electronic news groups.)

Steps to strengthen library:

A concerted effort should also be made to expand the ADB’s library collection on microfinance.

Designate a person in the library to collect microfinance materials. Provide funds for making library acquisitions on microfinance, including subscribing to

a few key journals. Maintain list of electronic addresses that may be useful for ADB staff who are working

on microfinance projects.

Steps to build support in member countries:

ADB cannot impose projects on member countries. It must find ways to encourage opinion makers and policy makers in these countries to request, or at least to tolerate, projects that are consistent with the new paradigm. Policy makers who are committed to the old paradigm are seldom persuaded to change their views through brief discussions about the terms of donor loans.

Hold several regional workshops on the new paradigm for policy makers and opinion makers in member countries.

Reinforce these workshops by sending appropriate publications on microfinance to those who attend.

Establish and manage an electronic news group and associated web page on the topic of microfinance in Africa.

Design and do a pilot microfinance sector study. This model can then be used in later studies elsewhere.

Do several other microfinance sector studies that focus on semi-formal and informal finance in areas outside of urban centers. Use the results of these studies to prepare ADB projects in microfinance and as background material for courses and workshops on microfinance.

Steps in learning from pilot projects

There are two ways of gaining useful information about microfinance projects: one way is to read about or visit successful projects developed by other agencies. Another way is to learn-by-doing through carrying out a few pilot projects with ADB resources. ADB has done a number of microfinance projects and these efforts should be considered

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as initial steps in a broader effort to learn from pilot projects. Attempts should also be made to redirect some of the resources already committed to traditional agricultural credit projects to a few pilot projects in microfinance.

The results of the small number of representative ADB-sponsored microfinance projects should be evaluated. This should include adjusting the evaluation criteria so they are consistent with the new paradigm, especially regarding sustainability and outreach. The results of these evaluations should then be shared with bank staff.

The bank has a substantial amount of resources in pipeline that are committed to traditional agricultural credit activities. It will take a number of years for these funds to disburse fully. Since the objectives of these projects are often inconsistent with the new Vision Statement of the bank, it may be appropriate to redirect some of these resources to a few microfinance pilot projects.

Steps to foster interest in deposit mobilization:

Early in the process of converting to the new paradigm, emphasis should be placed on directing more attention to deposit mobilization. Donors and development practitioners are prone to stress lending efforts because they are ways to move money that is often easy, compared to other development options. Deposit mobilization is often overlooked because of traditional assumptions about poor people lacking the ability or capacity to save and because there is a large measure of self-help involved in deposit mobilization.

Establish professional contacts with MicroSave-Africa in Nairobi. Seek their assistance in developing several pilot deposit mobilization projects in member countries.

Establish professional contacts with the International, U.S., Canadian, and European credit union organizations.

Do a survey of the status of credit unions, postal savings systems, and savings clubs in Africa.

Do an additional study of deposit mobilization in rural areas by commercial banks in a few representative countries in Africa.

Establish professional contacts with European organizations that have worked on reform of postal savings systems in Africa (FINAFRICA, IPC and others).

Commission several studies in representative African countries that focuses on the constraints faced by commercial banks in offering more deposit services in rural areas.

Establish professional contacts with other donors that are working on reforming bank regulation and supervision. Are there any reforms in Africa that include adjusting the regulatory framework so it is friendlier to organizations providing microfinance?

Help design regulation and supervision in several countries that is tailored to accommodate deposit mobilization by non-traditional organizations.

Develop several projects that focus on reforming postal savings systems in rural areas, promoting or reforming credit unions, or stimulating banks to provide more and better deposit services in rural areas.

Steps in building training capacity:

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As the interest in microfinance increases in Africa it may be useful to develop training facilities and courses in Abidjan where nationals from other African countries can study best practices in microfinance. CGAP, again, may be willing to help with this.

Work with Joint African Institute and CGAP to develop such courses

Steps to strengthen evaluations:

Application of the new paradigm requires the bank to adjust the way it evaluates the performance of rural finance projects. It will also require people with more banking and financial skills in the evaluation department.

Hire several people with bank and finance skills in the evaluation department. Develop new evaluation guidelines for rural finance projects that are consistent with

the new paradigm. Hold training workshops on the new paradigm for those working in the evaluation

department.

Steps to eliminate crowding out:

In some countries it may be difficult to develop new and successful microfinance programs in rural areas without changes in other rural lending activities. Government-owned banks or non-governmental agencies that are dispensing subsidies in rural areas may crowd out more efficient forms of finance, including ADB sponsored projects under the new paradigm. It may be necessary to eliminate, or at least substantially reduce, this crowding out before starting new microfinance projects in many countries in Africa.

ADB might take the lead in fostering discussions about government-owned agricultural development banks. Should these banks be reformed, downsized, liquidated, merged with other banks, or privatized?

Can these development banks play a positive role in deposit mobilization? ADB might also take the lead in promoting discussions about non-governmental

organizations that are dispensing subsidies and that are likely to remain subsidy dependent indefinitely.

This may involve coordination with other donors to assure that crowding out is minimized across projects and encouraging governments to discourage microfinance projects that do not employ the new paradigm.

Overall, in applying the new paradigm, the bank must adopt a longer time horizon for its rural finance projects than it has for most of its agricultural credit projects. Building or strengthening non-traditional financial institutions that primarily service poor people in rural areas requires a good deal of time and patience. It may take ten years or more, for example, for a micro-financial institution to mature to the point where it becomes creditworthy in the eyes of banks and qualifies to legally mobilize deposits.

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Appendix Number 7: SOURCES OF INFORMATION ON MICROFINANCE

A number of organizations issue useful information about microfinance. Contact information for some of the most prominent of these sources follows:

The MicroBanking Bulletin is published by CALMEADOW. Electronic versions of the Bulletin can be downloaded from the Website: www.pactpub.com. Hard copies can be ordered through Email: books@pactpub.org.

The Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP) also publishes a number of useful items on microfinance. Their Email address is cproject@worldbank.org. Their web site is: http://www.cgap.org/.

The World Bank also has other publications on microfinance. Their Email address is: books@worldbank.org.

The Sustainable Banking for the Poor project in the World Bank is another source of publications on microfinance. Their electronic address is: http://www-esd.worldbank.org/skbp/home.htm.

The MicroFinance Network is a global association of leading microfinance institutions.  It holds annual conferences and issues publications on leading-edge topics.  For information on publications and other activities, see their web site at http://www.mfnetwork.org .

MicroSave-Africa is an international organization located in Nairobi, Kenya. It concentrates on the problems of mobilizing deposits. It’s website is http://www.uncdf.org/sum/msa.

Planetfinance periodically issues electronic Library News. It includes a report of events, news, sites and publications relevant to microfinance.  It is available in English and French.  To subscribe write an email to plibary@planetfinance.org and request the language of your choice.  

Khula is an independent, limited liability company in South Africa dedicated to assisting Retail Financial Intermediaries (RFIs) such as banks, NGO's and provincial development organizations in creating sustainable small, medium and micro enterprises. It’s website is : http://www.khuyla.org.za.

Planetfinance has an e-mailing-list for microfinance practitioners in Asia.  It enables them to share and discuss ideas online, and at the same time creates an Asia wide network of professionals able to share the methods of best practices.  If you would like to be added to the list, send an email message to bhim@planetfinance.org.

ACCION International is a leading organization in microfinance. Their web site is http://www.accion.org.  In The World of Microfinance section,there are links to many other resources worldwide.  In the Publications section web visitors will find a complete catalog of ACCION and Microfinance Network publications for practitioners.

The Development Finance Network (devfinance) is an electronic news group managed by the Ohio State University:devfinance@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu.

AFRACA is a regional organization of agricultural lenders whose office is in Nairobi, Kenya. They sponsor meetings and also issue periodic publications on rural finance. Their Email address is AFRACA@users.Africaonline.

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The German development agency, GTZ, occasionally publishes papers on micro finance, especially on the topic of regulation and supervision of microfinance Institutions. Their website is http://www.gtz.de/arbeitsfelder/ebene3.asp?z=41&ProjectId=4. The general Email address for those working on microfinance is: financial.systems@gtz.de.

A range of information about microfinance in the U.S. can be found at www. microenterprise works.org.  This is the web site of the Association for Enterprise Opportunity, a professional association of U.S. organizations working in this sector.

FIELD (supported by The Aspen Institute) is a research and development fund dedicated to the expansion and sustainability of micro-enterprises in the United States.  Email them at fieldus@aspeninstit.org.

The Alexandria Business Association (ABA) was started in 1989 by local businessmen and the USAID in Egypt. ABA offers consulting, training and technical assistance in the field of microfinance. Their website is http://www.aba-sme.com.

The Bank Rakyat Indonesia (BRI) International Visitor Program was established in June 1996 under a partnership agreement between BRI and USAID. The program is designed to allow visitors from overseas to learn about the BRI Unit banking system. The International Visitor Program of BRI conducts various visitor programs, in-class training programs and on the job training and consultancy services related to microfinance practices. Contact ivp@bri.co.id for more information. Also visit their website: http://www.ids.ac.uk/cgap/download/BRI.htm.

AfriCap is a new investment fund for African microfinance institutions. For more information on this fund contact: sharpe@calmeadow.com.

PRIDE located in Tanzania provides information on small enterprises. Their web page address is: http://www.prideafrica.com.

MYRAD in India provides information on alternative credit systems. Their web page address is http://www.myrad.org.

FINCA, the Foundation for Inter-national Community Assistance, does work on village banking worldwide. Their web page address is http://www.villagebanking.org.

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