Mzungu in Kasungu

Mzungu in Kasungu
Daniella in Kasungu

Friday 22 October 2010

Preparing for my return to Malawi

It’s all go as we sort out the plans for my 5 week visit to Malawi in November. We’ve got lots to cover including checking the progress of the Progress out of Poverty Index roll out and completing the training of the final branch in the Central Region; talking to our star trainers about the detail of how we’re going to structure our redeveloped training approach and what delivery methods (like songs, dancing, games, etc) we’re going to use; and facilitating workshops with all our Loan Offers across the 3 regions of the country.

The workshops are a really exciting opportunity to meet with the people – our Loan Officers – who work at the front line with our clients and know them the very best. They’ve been kept up to date with all the Social Performance Management work we’ve been doing and have started making changes to the way they work, but now’s we’re taking the time to meet with them all personally. We’ll cover important issues including helping clients to appraise the appropriateness of each other’s loan sizes, ensuring that clients save regularly and don’t just dump in a large sum right before disbursement (which wouldn’t therefore be representative of their cash flow and probably means they have borrowed the money), empowering the clients to problem solve within the group, and so on. We’ll be using interactive approaches – like role play – to make the messages fun and help our staff to remember them.

The operations team have also been hard at work piloting some new products, one of which is a small loan aimed at the poorest clients which doesn’t require them to have any savings as a deposit and has a maximum loan size of K5,000 (just over £20). The other is in response to clients telling us they don’t like the fortnightly repayments: we’re therefore trialling a 3-weekly repayment product aimed at those clients who have already demonstrated their capabilities, and are ready to move to slightly bigger loans than our average standard loan sizes, of between K30,000-K60,000 (around £125-£250). So whilst I’m in Malawi it’s a good opportunity to see how these pilots are progressing, talk to the branch staff about any technical difficulties and to the women about how they’re finding the products. It’s still very early days, but important to catch any potential problems as early on as possible.

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