Microfinance and study

Today's lecture was guest lecture, Lin Lerpold, Assistant Professor of SSE. She has many experiences both in business and academic. However, I felt her lecture was less interesting than I thought.

The lecture was well organized because we did many things, understanding a basic mechanism of Microfinance, describing challenges of Hand in Hand, and group work and presentation. In the introduction, she talked about five points of microfinance:

1. Peer Selection; lending to group
2. Peer Monitoring; monitor through the group
3. Dynamic incentive; start small lend, and it becomes bigger if repayment is satisfied.
4. Regular Repayment Schedule; repayment is done regularly immediately after lending
5. Collateral Substitute; there is no collateral, but have immediate fund that is 0.5% of loan as the substitute of collateral.

Next, we discussed about a case of Hand in Hand. There were too many activities that Hand in Hand was taking. Her explanation was this was typical type of NGOs because if they want to expand Microfinance, social infrastructure is needed such as school, citizen center, environment, and health and medical care. It was quite interesting point, and for me, it was also interesting to discuss more about confliction of vision and efficiency.

After that, we divided into five groups and did role play taking a role in a group. It was so excited because one of students were from India and had experience to work in a NGO. He said collecting donation is easy and hiring people also easy. But finding right people is difficult and sometimes there are scandals for NGO, such as farmer’s suicides.

About presentation of each group, there was nothing special. Of course, every presentation was clever and each has good information, but it is not real, meaningless to discuss a lot. I think this was the reason why the Indian student seemed to feel boring in the lecture. By the way, English fluentness was much important I felt…