To John Dada and readers of my open letters at http://dadamac.posterous.com

John - at our team meeting this morning you mentioned CGAP:

CGAP logo
website at http://www.cgap.org/p/site/c/home/

You said:

When bandwidth stability permits, I would like to explore the CGAP website, where they discuss several microfinance products. If we find anything specific for housing, agriculture or petty trading, we can explore those.

I'm exploring it at the moment - I'll cut and paste odds and ends as I go along. I'm not selecting specifically for relevnace as much as missing our everything that has no relevnace to you because it's "wrong country" or "news story" etc. Perhaps ther will be something you want to click on. Obviously I don't want to do anything to infringe their copyright - but I would think a few tasters of content, with links back to their site would be in their interest. 

I remember that Tobias used to provide a service at Kabissa that made it easier to access information online if you had low bandwidth, I don-t know if that service still exists.

Also - I know that you often need to use your phone to access the Internet. We started to explore more effective use of phones on the Internet with Paul Robison before the post election violence. Maybe it is time for us to see if we can fix up that chat with him
I will cut and paste you some bits from the website below - with apologies for any weird formatting that results.
The pages I have checked so far are "home", "about microfinance" and "about us".
I have yet to do "our work" (which I have clicked on and seems to have a lot of useful infarmation) "publications" and "media" 


 
  

 




Pamela
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THE MICROFINANCE GATEWAY

A service of CGAP, the Microfinance Gateway is the most comprehensive online resource for the global microfinance community.

Towards “Fair Trade Microfinance”: A proposed new Seal of Excellence would recognize superior achievement by microfinance institutions focused on reducing poverty. Is this the right time to introduce this initiative? And can it address skepticism about the priorities and performance of microfinance? Read the latest Microfinance Voices to learn more.

Tilman Ehrbeck shares his thoughts: on the fast-changing landscape of access to finance and his vision for CGAP in an interview with the Microfinance Gateway six months after his appointment as CEO of CGAP. Read the full interview and comment. You can also watch a short video of Tilman introducing Jonathan Murdoch at the Belgian Microfinance Lunchbreak in Brussels here.

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Foreign Capital Investment in Microfinance: Despite the financial crisis, in the past four years foreign investment in microfinance, including both debt and equity, has quadrupled to reach US$13 billion.

Measuring Changes in Client Lives through Microfinance: This Brief looks at the monitoring and assessment tools the microfinance industry uses to measure elements of social performance such as client poverty levels

 

Cross-border Funding of Microfinance: This Focus Note draws on data from CGAP’s annual surveys on cross-border funding (2009, 2010) to provide an overview of the microfinance funding landscape and trends in cross-border funding.


Reaching the Poorest: This paper highlights the lessons learned from the CGAP–Ford Foundation Graduation Program, a series of 10 pilot projects in eight countries.