ACCION International

18.05.2005 Rosalind Copisarow recently joined ACCION International as Senior Vice President, International Operations for Africa, Asia and Europe. She is a senior banker, entrepreneur and public policy influencer with 15 years experience in blue chip investment banks. She has made significant contributions to the microfinance industry, including starting Fundusz Mikro, Poland’s most successful microfinance organization and founding Street (UK), a British microfinance institution. Additionally, she contributed to the Policy Advisory Group of The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), the World Bank-led multilateral institute for best practices in microfinance. She joins Senior Vice Presidents Carlos Castello and Elisabeth Rhyne in leading ACCION’s aggressive global expansion.

05.05.2005

© ACCION International

María Otero, ACCION International's President & CEO, and Beatriz Marulanda presented this "Profile of Microfinance in Latin America in 10 Years" at the Latin America/Caribbean Region Microcredit Summit Meeting of Councils (LACRMS) in Santiago, Chile, April 19-22, 2005.

21.04.2005

Alvaro Uribe © Radio Netherlands Wereldomroep

ACCION International was honored with a visit from Colombian President Uribe for the inauguration of new ACCION Centro offices in March. President Uribe inaugurated the new offices in the presence of several hundred invited guests, including Julio Mario Santo Domingo, a strong supporter and partner of ACCION. Having outgrown its previous space, ACCION Centro, ACCION Bogota group, moved into the new offices with partner Fundación Mario Santo Domingo. In addition to better office space, the new building also houses classrooms for the ABCs of Business training program run by ACCION Centro. ABCs of Business teaches microentrepreneurs the basics of running a business so that they may effectively work their way out of poverty.

13.04.2005 Every year the challenge of finding funds to finance millions of microloans requires microfinance institutions (MFIs) to tap increasingly large pools of funds and to find sources that are reliably available at an advantageous cost. ACCION International staff members shared their knowledge on this important topic by authoring articles of the latest volume of the Small Enterprise Journal (SED) issue on The Financing of Microfinance. The journal features articles on equity funds created for investing in MFIs and debt-based strategies for funding MFIs. Two of the articles on debt-based strategies describe financing that are common in mainstream finance, but are new to microfinance. Copies of this March 2005 issue can be purchased on the ACCION International publications website http://www.accion.org/pubs.

30.03.2005 ACCION recently improved the functionality of its publications website and cut prices by 10-50% on more than 30 of its titles (in English and in Spanish) and titles from the Microfinance Network with the aim of disseminating its work more widely and making room for new titles. ACCION also announced publication of Marguerite Robinson’s seminal work, The Microfinance Revolution: Sustainable Finance for the Poor in Spanish and a report on the poverty levels of microfinance clients at BancoSol, Bolivia.