New Triodos Facet Publications

See short description below. Both Publications can be found on Triodos Facet website here. 

Risk Management and Sustainability Management: A Handbook for Microfinance Practitioners 2009
Authors: Tom Baur, John Guzowski, Geert Jan Schuite, Triodos Facet, September 2009.

This Handbook on Sustainability and Risk Management is intended to help microfinance institutions by suggesting a practical approach for improving their performance.

Few areas of banking are more important these days than the ability to mange risks. As the sector professionalises, the enviironmental, health and safety impact becomes more relevant to fiancial institutions. Eleven practical tools form the core of this handbook.

Trends in Microfinance
Authors: Stefan Platteau, Hedwig Siewertsen, Triodos Facet , May 2009.

Triodos Facet has looked into the future and found trends in Microfinance for 2010 - 2015. Read about the disappearance of the term microfinance, the entrance of new service providers and the future of self help groups, technology and value chain development in microfinance.  

Microfinance Insights May/June 2009 issue

An interesting article by Micol Guarneri in Microfinance Insights:

Elusive Impact or Concrete Change: How Social Performance Assessment is Helping to Change the Face of Reporting in Microfinance When chasing multiple bottom line returns in microfinance, attaining concrete evidence on social impact can often be cost prohibitive and time-consuming, not to mention difficult to segregate causality. Yet achieving more concrete evidence of MFI social performance is not as elusive as it once seemed. The evolution and importance of social performance management and measurement—for donors, investors and MFIs alike—indicates the growing consensus around treating social performance as a process rather than a static outcome. Micol Guarneri, the Director of the Social Rating Department at MicroFinanza Rating, discusses how social rating, complementary to the traditional financial performance assessment, is emerging as a tool through which an MFI’s social returns may be monitored and even benchmarked against best practice and industry standards.

See here for a link to this and other interesting articles on Microfinance and Impact. By the way: This interesting periodic gives away free 1-yr subscriptions. Check them out!

Social Performance Taskforce New Website

http://www.sptf.info/ is the new platform of the Social Performance task Force.

The Social Performance Task Force consists of over 350 leaders from all over the world from every microfinance stakeholder group: practitioners, donors and investors (multilateral, bilateral, and private), national and regional networks, technical assistance providers, rating agencies, academics and researchers, and others. Created in March 2005, the Task Force has been charged with clearly defining social performance and addressing questions about measuring and managing social performance.

MF and Climate Change: Can MFI's promote sustainable change?

Download the discussion report (see post below) here.