It's the holiday season in the United States, which means many bloggers are talking about gifts, giving, philanthropy and the state of the world.  All this gift-blogging got me thinking about one of my favorite gifts (to give and to receive) - Kiva gift certificates.  If you need to pick up a last minute stocking stuffer, you could do a lot worse.  (Don't know Kiva?  We've written about them before, including interviews with founders Matt and Jessica, as well as a comparison between them and MicroPlace, a P2P microfinance competitor.)

There's another way to give Kiva, but it won't fit in a stocking: you can give yourself.  That's right: if you're looking to get involved in microfinance very personally, Kiva has a Fellowship program that allows volunteers to spend anywhere from 10 weeks to a year working for a microfinance organization.  According to their web site:

The Kiva Fellows Program offers individuals a rare opportunity to travel abroad and witness firsthand the impact and realities of microfinance, by working directly with a host microfinance institution (MFI). The Kiva Fellow is an unpaid, volunteer based position designed to increase Kiva's impact and to offer participants a unique insider experience. Past participants have found the fellowship to be a great first step in a career in microfinance or international development.

All the details are available on their web site.  I've been keeping my eye on the Kiva Fellows program for the past few months, especially as the financial crisis unfolded here in New York.  I wondered, what are all these newly-unemployed finance pros going to do with their time?  Maybe some of them are going to want to give back - but how?  A Kiva Fellowship is a good place to start.

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Guest blogger Karen Lynn Vincent, a serial social benefit entrepreneur, is the co-founder and current chief operating officer at Resdida, a hybrid social business distributing content via mobile devices to the rural poor. She also works with the Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) in the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University.

She sent us the following post from Santa Clara, California, where the Transformative Changes through Science and Technology: The Role for Social Benefit Entrepreneurs conference took place last week.

By Karen Lynn Vincent

During his morning address, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Muhammad Yunus of the Grameen Bank said that the integration of the many Grameen companies occurs not in structure or organization but with the woman in the village.  The Grameen companies are separate entities that converge in their compassion and empathy for the rural poor. 

Compassion and empathy were the recurrent themes of the day at the Transformative Changes through Science and Technology: The Role for Social Benefit Entrepreneurs conference, presented by the Center for Science, Technology and Society at Santa Clara University in on November 13, 2008.  This conference was held following and in conjunction with the Tech Awards Gala on the evening of November 12 at the Tech Museum in San Jose and brought the many sponsors and laureates together for a highly inspirational day.

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Guest blogger Roxanne Miller is a 2nd-year MBA student at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, focusing her studies on the intersection of international development, social enterprise and technology.  She spent this past summer interning at Unitus and working on an ICTD health care project in Uganda.  Prior to Haas, Roxanne was a Kiva Fellow in Tanzania and spent several years in marketing roles at Yahoo! and American Express.  She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Communications.

By Roxanne Miller

I was very excited to listen to the speakers as I walked into the "Beyond Microfinance" panel at the Social Capital Markets Conference. I had read about the Clinton Global Initiative commitments that both Root Capital and Leapfrog Investments made last month; it was also an opportunity to hear about the work I had seen unfold while working for Unitus this past summer.

The panelists, led by moderator Betsy Zeidman of the Milken Institute, discussed new services and financial structures being designed to help the people at the base of the pyramid. Jim Roth of Leapfrog Investments spoke about the emerging area of microinsurance,  Derek Streat of Unitus discussed how insights from the microfinance industry could be leveraged to other sectors and William Foote of Root Capital talked about the innovative ways he is working to bring capital to small and growing businesses.

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With three weeks to go before the U.S. presidential election, it’s no surprise that there’s a lot of interest in democracy here at the Social Capital Markets conference.  Fortunately, the conversation has (thus far) steered clear of moose burgers and the Weather Underground.  After all, the democracy we’re discussing here at SoCap08 is actually related to democratic capital, not democratic governance.  

What is democratic capital, and why should the base of the pyramid community care?  Well, on a very basic level, the democratic capital panel is all about giving investors and borrowers the power to connect directly, without the intermediation of too many financial institutions.  This person-to-person connection takes the shape of four panelists and their social enterprises:

• Robert Chatwani, WorldofGood
• Mads Kjaer, MyC4
• Premal Shah, Kiva
• Tracey Pettingill-Turner, MicroPlace

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Guest blogger Sofia Leon is currently the Senior Program Coordinator at the Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International. Her passion is sustainable social enterprise, specifically seeking to scale BOP energy delivery without subsidies.

By Sofia Leon

Following an all-star Opening Plenary, I walked upstairs at the 2008 Clinton Global Initiative to see Chris Crane of Opportunity International, Elizabeth Littlefield of CGAP, and Maria Otero of ACCION International. I work in microfinance and was clearly excited to hear this panel, but I walked into a packed room whose attention was set on the microfinance discussion at hand.

Track director Jane Wales introduced the panel, and after individual project updates from each of the three panelists, Jane asked Maria Otero to announce a new CGI Commitment spreading across the microfinance industry: The Campaign for Client Protection in Microfinance.

Maria Otero set the stage, describing how the growing interest from commercial lenders in serving the markets at the BoP make it essential for MFIs, MFI networks, and in general, institutions serving low income markets to proactively embrace client protection rather than having it forced upon them by governments, donors, or as a compliance matter by investors.

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ACCION International has been instrumental in the rise and mainstreaming of microfinance as a key component of bottom-up approaches to poverty alleviation. It has played a key role in promoting thriving organizations that are bringing financial services to the poor.

Under the leadership of prominent figures like Maria Otero and Michael Chu, ACCION has built an impressive portfolio partners that they are often trendsetters in their countries. Take Bancosol, for instance, a central player in the rise of the increasingly efficient and competitive Bolivian microfinance industry. The same can be said about Peru's Mibanco and, naturally, Mexico's Compartamos, whose groundbreaking incursion into the capital markets has been widely commented here in Nextbillion.net.

Such an impressive track record provides a remarkable platform to draw lessons learned, identify key trends and factors of success in the purpose of extending high quality financial services to the poor. Thus I was pleased to learn about the launch of the Center for Financial Inclusion, its latest venture. The center will bring together private sector, non-profit and academic expertise to advance the dialogue around and implementation of innovative practices in three key areas: consumer protection in microfinance, product innovation and microfinance investment.

I encourage you to visit the Center's website and learn more about this promising initiative. Moreover, if you are around, register for the launch of the center next Tuesday by e-mailing center@accion.org. If you are not in DC but want to join and follow a vibrant and fresh conversation about microfinance and the issues listed above, here are two suggestions: bookmark their website and add its new blog to your RSS feeds.

Best of luck to the team on board of this new and exciting initiative. We look forward to joining the conversation and seeing how it translates into increased activity in the development through enterprise space.    

Last month, the Silicon Valley Microfinance Network cosponsored "Microfinance West: The Investment Opportunity Conference." This event, which brought together some of the leading commercial players in the microfinance field, was heavily geared towards institutional and retail investors in the financial community. The topics ran the gamut from attracting capital to mitigating risk to benchmarking against other asset classes.

Though the focus was clearly financial, heavyweights from the development side also presented, including Elizabeth Funk, Chairman of the Board of Unitus, and Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President of Women's World Banking. The most provocative comment, however, came from Janine Firpo of Sevak Solutions as she described the evolution of financial services in the US and how technology has continued to lower the costs of transactions.

Warning the audience in advance, Janine shared her thoughts on an area that many might consider to be heretical. She challenged the attendees to question whether default rates on microfinance loans were really the right place to focus, or if in fact the emphasis on achieving 99% repayment rates might be somewhat misguided. Most microfinance institutions today follow a high-touch model, relying on a loan officer that makes frequent visits to his or her clients to collect loan payments and continually reinforce their need to repay. While this has been extremely effective it is also inherently unscalable; as the client base increases, the number of loan officers needed to serve them must also increase.

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