Alex Counts
President, Grameen Foundation USA
acounts@gfusa.org

Julie Stahl
Program Officer, Grameen Foundation USA
jstahl@gfusa.org

Christopher Dunford
President, Freedom From Hunger
cdunford@freefromhunger.org

Anne Hastings
Director, Fonkoze
Fonkoze@aol.com

“Give Us Credit: The Value of Investing Women Entrepreneurs”

Presentation Abstract:
Micro-finance has been shown to be effective in reducing poverty and in empowering women (especially through using effective approaches such as credit with education), when that has been an explicit goal of micro-finance institutions (MFIs) and when incentive systems are put in place by funders and MFI managers to reward those who produce these outcomes. At the same time, it has been shown that micro-financed can be done profitably, and in a way that suggests that in many markets, relatively mature and well-managed MFIs should be able to tap into almost limitless pools of capital to finance their expansion. Several innovative financing models have been piloted recently, including securitization of MFI portfolios, and others are in advanced stages of development. The question remains whether MFIs that tap into these pool of capital will have their social missions and outcomes compromised as a result, and whether this can be avoided. This panel will explore these recent developments, and tackle the issue of commercialization and social empowerment, and what experience suggests about how they can be pursued together, particularly in those markets that have large numbers of the world's poorest families.

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Biography:
Alex Counts has been a micro-credit practitioner and advocate since he served as a Fulbright scholar at the Grameen Bank of Bangladesh in 1988. He lived in Bangladesh for six years, during which time he authored Give Us Credit, a book chronicling the success of micro-credit in Bangladesh and inner-city Chicago in the U.S.A. Since 1997 he has been serving as the President and CEO of Grameen Foundation USA, which is based in Washington, DC.

Julie Stahl has more than ten years of experience in the field of finance and accounting, including positions at KPMG, Hewitt Associates and a technology consulting firm where she was Director of Strategic Initiatives. She has used her experience and skills acquired in the corporate world to contribute to development projects such as a school in Honduras and various microfinance programs in South Asia and Africa. She joined Grameen Foundation USA in November 2002 as a Program Officer with a regional focus on Southeast Asia, particularly India, and is concentrating her work on the capital markets and developing innovative financing strategies for microfinance institutions. Julie holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a BBA in Accounting from Southern Methodist University.

Chris Dunford, President of Freedom from Hunger since 1991, holds a Ph.D. in ecology and sociology from the University of Arizona in Tucson. He joined Freedom from Hunger in 1984 as Director of the Arizona Program and later Regional Director for the United States and then Vice President for Programs. His previous work experience with the United Nations Environment Program in Nairobi and various rural development programs in Africa has been instrumental in the planning and management of Freedom from Hunger’s programs in Africa, Asia and Latin America as well as the United States. Dunford is one of the architects of Credit with Education, a strategy for providing self-financing poverty lending to rural women while simultaneously providing education on health, nutrition and better business practices. Dunford led Freedom from Hunger to focus on demonstrating that Credit with Education can empower hundreds of thousands of very poor rural women in developing countries—through linkage to financial institution credit and savings opportunities and to non-formal adult education opportunities—all the while recovering its recurrent costs. Dunford has been an invited speaker for the World Bank, USAID, the Microcredit Summit, the SEEP (Small Enterprise Education and Promotion) Network, the Thrasher Research Fund, FICAH (Food Industry Crusade Against Hunger), the Global Dialogue on Microfinance and Human Development in Stockholm, Sweden, and Brigham Young, Brown, Ohio State and Princeton universities, among others. He has published on ecology, cultural evolution, strategic planning and program design and evaluation of rural development programs.

Anne H. Hastings, Ph.D., has been the Director of Fonkoze, Haiti's Alternative Bank for the Organized Poor, since its infancy in May 1996. Before coming to Haiti, Dr. Hastings had fifteen years of experience in providing strategic management services to executives and in managing young organizations for high performance and steady growth. Her clients included top executives in numerous federal government agencies and non-profit organizations. Dr. Hastings holds a Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Prior to obtaining her Ph.D., she completed research fellowships at the Brookings Institution and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations, both in Washington, D.C.