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Making a Clear Difference
ADB Review [ January - February 2004 ]

Training women’s NGOs in delivering financial services is expanding outreach to 20,000 poor clients

By Carolyn Dedolph (cdedolph@adb.org)
External Relations Specialist

DHAKA, BANGLADESH

Many female-headed microfinance nongovernment organizations (NGOs) express a common challenge. “We lack organizational skills in areas such as management and financial systems,” says one staff member. “We need to be better organized and make our financial information and record-keeping more systematic.”

Many small-scale female-headed NGOs provide microfinance services to women throughout Bangladesh. By targeting women not served by larger microfinance organizations, they provide an invaluable service. Being small and local enable these NGOs to work with very poor women in isolated areas. But these NGOs often lack staff, financial management skills, and the institutional capacity to expand outreach and become fully sustainable. Also, they experience difficulty in accessing training to develop technical skills.

DEDICATED Fansura Khatun (right), a Welfare Efforts field organizer, says she needs to improve her business skills to meet her biggest challenge: making her clients self-reliant

The Credit and Development Forum (CDF) is an umbrella NGO representing more than 900 microfinance organizations in Bangladesh, including 76 female-headed NGOs. Recognizing that most of its femaleheaded partner NGOs faced specific, common challenges, CDF sought ADB financial assistance to develop and deliver specific training modules to strengthen their institutional capacity.

A major goal of many of the NGOs is to build enough capacity to qualify for funding from the Palli Karma Sahayak Foundation (PKSF), donors, and commercial banks, which would greatly expand the range of products and financial resources available.

Twenty NGOs were picked to participate in the project—with the selection process itself a training exercise. Many even found it difficult to provide the information required by CDF as part of a baseline survey used to profile the female-headed NGOs—and reinforced to them the need for more systematic record keeping. Ultimately, a baseline survey profiled 30 smalland medium-sized female-headed NGOs.

Rokeya Jahan Reba, Executive Director of Promotional Research Advocacy Training Action Yard—a Dhaka-based NGO that organizes slum residents, provides microfinance services, and teaches them to be self-reliant—benefited from the CDF leadership training.

“I now look into our accounts every day,” says Ms. Reba. The new methods are “simpler and easier for the staff to handle.” With clearer accounting procedures, the financial statements are transparent and easy to understand. Because of this, she has noticed increased trust from clients. The training proved so valuable, in fact, that other organizations recruited several of her staff members—but she good naturedly says they are “spreading the knowledge.”

Fifty female NGO workers were trained on supervision and monitoring, microfinance-related accounts management, and management information systems. The increased efficiency of these partner NGOs is improving the delivery of financial services to about 20,000 poor female clients.

Sharifa Khatun, Executive Director of Welfare Efforts, an NGO focusing on microfinance, education, and gender and social justice programs, says the CDF training on accounting systems was very useful. With her improved financial management skills, she dreams of establishing a core fund for the organization so that it can be self-supporting.

“The workshops have exposed us to new ideas on how to develop our organization,” says another participant. But there is still much to do.

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