Breaking the Cycle GRAMEEN FOUNDATION OVERVIEW
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ANNUAL REPORT 2013-2014 Breaking the Cycle GRAMEEN FOUNDATION OVERVIEW Grameen Foundation helps the world’s poor reach their potential. We provide access to essential financial services and to information on agriculture and health that addresses the specific needs of poor households and communities. We also develop tools to improve the effectiveness of our fellow poverty-focused organizations. Grameen Foundation was started in 1997 to harness the underappreciated strengths of the poor, an approach inspired by Nobel Laureate Professor Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Professor Yunus was a founding member of our Board of Directors and today serves as director emeritus. Our high standards and efficiency have earned us a four-star rating from Charity Navigator and recognition from the Better Business Bureau’s Wise Giving Alliance and Guidestar’s Exchange Seal. GRAMEEN FOUNDATION 2013–2014 ANNUAL REPORT Letter from the President and Chairman of the Board 3 Our Story 4 Financial Highlights 12 Board of Directors 15 Staff 16 Bankers without Borders® Volunteers 17 Take Action 18 WWW.GRAMEENFOUNDATION.ORG 1 2 WWW.GRAMEENFOUNDATION.ORG LETTER FROM THE PRESIDENT AND CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD We all had good reason for cheer this past year. New World Bank figures showed that the number of people living on less than $1.25 per day—the international standard for living in extreme poverty—fell by almost 60 percent during the past three decades. Life expectancy has increased—even in the poorest countries—and fewer people are dying from preventable diseases. Though there’s still a lot of work to be done, it is important for us to celebrate these victories in the battle to defeat global poverty. They are a clear sign that the international community is making progress on one of the most important issues of our day. It is unfor- tunate that many believe that global poverty remains an immovable problem. (A recent poll showed that 67 percent of Americans believe worldwide poverty has increased.) As poverty rates continue to fall, the challenge for all of us is to accelerate the pace of positive change. For us at Grameen Foundation, it means using the information technol- ogy revolution to provide less expensive and higher quality economic development and social services, especially in remote areas that have historically been underserved. (There are now more than 6 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the developing world.) It means designing products that respond to the specific needs of poor people and the organiza- tions that serve them. And it means ensuring that we and our allies rigorously measure progress and use data to continuously improve services. As you will read in the following pages, in the past fiscal year (April 2013 – March 2014), we expanded our work in Latin America to strengthen farmer cooperatives and improve food security through collaborations with private humanitarian organizations, government agencies, and progressive businesses. We continued to develop integrated solutions like the e-Warehouse initiative, which gives farmers in Kenya access to agricultural training and much-needed financial services. In addition, we completed our successful microsavings project in Asia, which enabled hundreds of thousands of poor families to open bank accounts for the first time, and also taught us profound lessons about how to design solutions that maximize benefits to the poor. Through these and other initiatives, we collectively touched the lives of more than 6 million people. Our success on the ground is a direct result of the generous support of the thousands of people who donate time and money each year to Grameen Foundation. Thank you for your commitment to making a tangible difference in the lives of poor women and their families in the regions where we are hard at work. Alex Counts, President and CEO Robert Eichfeld, Chairman WWW.GRAMEENFOUNDATION.ORG 3 FINANCIAL SERVICES PICKING UP THE PIECES AFTER A STORM After Typhoon Haiyan roared through the Philippines in November 2013, the staff at CARD MRI, a coalition of microfinance and community organizations, sprang into action, providing relief supplies and other services. For their clients, one key resource was their savings accounts at CARD Bank. Grameen Foundation had just completed a four-year project at CARD Bank that helped it to expand its savings services across the Philippines. As part of the project, CARD Bank launched a savings education drive and developed two new types of savings accounts (one for children under 16 and another that offered a lower savings balance and access to savings via ATM machines). By the end of our project, CARD Bank’s clients had opened 480,000 accounts, including 42,500 accounts for children. It had also rolled out the education program in all 56 branches, which serve 20 provinces— including communities hit by the typhoon. The storm was a powerful reminder of the value of savings and having a safe place to save. “Some of the clients temporarily left the area but returned a week after the typhoon to start rebuilding,” said Glenda Magpantay, assistant vice president for operations at CARD Bank. In addition to rebuilding, clients used their savings to buy medicine, food and clothes. They were also thankful that their hard-earned money was safe at CARD Bank and had not been kept at home where it would have been washed away in the storm. Three months after the typhoon, CARD Bank held its first savings education drive in Tacloban City, one of the hard-hit areas. Almost 600 clients attended—a positive sign that more people will be better prepared for similar CARD Bank clients register for savings accounts in the Philippines catastrophes in the future. following the typhoon. Photo courtesy CARD Bank. Globally, 2.5 billion people lack access to formal savings an integral part of the services these organi- financial services like bank accounts, either because zations provided—a critical first step in giving the poor the services are unavailable or because they are not more financial security. The project yielded important designed to meet their needs. This makes it difficult insights that guide our ongoing efforts to help financial for them to access credit, send money back home to institutions serving the poor to research and identify distant relatives, build a financially secure future, or the needs of their clients and create a broad range of even save for emergencies. services tailored to those needs. We have also shared our findings broadly through publications and events Grameen Foundation is helping to lead new efforts, to help other organizations develop financial products through research and user testing, to design financial that better serve the needs of the poor. products and services that the world’s poor actually want and can use. Village Savings and Loan Associations provide a safe place for many Ugandans to save money. Members We ended our successful Microsavings Initiative can also request loans from the pooled funds. in October 2013, after helping three organizations Grameen Foundation worked with five associations create more than 922,000 savings accounts: Amhara to develop Ledger Link, a new smartphone app that Credit and Saving Institution (Ethiopia), CASHPOR enables these self-managed groups to digitize the Micro Credit (India) and CARD Bank (Philippines). financial records from their members’ transactions The four-year initiative, which was funded by the Bill rather than maintain them solely in a paper ledger & Melinda Gates Foundation, was designed to make book. This will enable the groups to have backup 4 WWW.GRAMEENFOUNDATION.ORG Grameen Foundation is using mobile technology to help savings groups in Uganda better manage their funds. copies of transactions and to build a credit history over McCaw through the Craig and Susan McCaw Technol- time. The added transparency also helps members ogy for Development Challenge. detect discrepancies between transactions recorded in Ledger Link and those in their ledger books. This We continue to invest in social enterprises through our project, which is funded by Barclays Bank, will be Pioneer Fund, which focuses on early-stage, innova- rolled out to more than 1,000 associations nationwide tive organizations that work in rural or hard-to-reach over the next two years. areas. Our current seven investees collectively serve or work with almost 54,000 people in four countries. Building on our work in Uganda, we launched two Since its inception, the Pioneer Fund has reached new initiatives in India and Kenya to create financial almost 278,000 people through investing $7.4 million services that will be provided via mobile phones. More in 14 organizations and two funds that support social poor families now have access to mobile phones, entrepreneurs. To ensure that our investments are thanks to falling prices, making these devices an ideal sound, we screen organizations using MOTIV, a score- channel for providing financial services. They are card we developed to confirm that the organizations’ especially useful for people living in far-flung areas. goals are aligned with our social mission. (We have Our work in India is supported by the Citi Foundation, also shared MOTIV with other social investors to help while our work in Kenya is supported by MasterCard set standards for the industry.) Worldwide and philanthropists Craig and Susan During the fiscal year Grameen Foundation ending March 31, 2014: issued $1.9 million in loan guarantees Grameen Generating Foundation helped Grameen $3.9 million create Foundation in financing 640,000 invested new savings more than to support accounts 28,609 $600,000 microloans in three in India and in seven social enterprises countries through the Philippines through the Pioneer Fund Growth Guarantees WWW.GRAMEENFOUNDATION.ORG 5 MOBILE AGRICULTURE BREAKING THE CYCLE OF FEAST AND FAMINE IN KENYA Lucy Kirito is part of a new effort to help farmers in Kenya.