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1、附录1RURAL FINANCE: MAINSTREAMING INFORMAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONSBy Hans Dieter SeibelAbstractInformal financial institutions (IFIs), among them the ubiquitous rotating savings and credit associations, are of ancient origin. Owned and self-managed by local people, poor and non-poor, they are self-help
2、 organizations which mobilize their own resources, cover their costs and finance their growth from their profits. With the expansion of the money economy, they have spread into new areas and grown in numbers, size and diversity; but ultimately, most have remained restricted in size, outreach and dur
3、ation. Are they best left alone, or should they be helped to upgrade their operations and be integrated into the wider financial market? Under conducive policy conditions, some have spontaneously taken the opportunity of evolving into semiformal or formal microfinance institutions (MFIs). This has u
4、sually yielded great benefits in terms of financial deepening, sustainability and outreach. Donors may build on these indigenous foundations and provide support for various options of institutional development, among them: incentives-driven mainstreaming through networking; encouraging the establish
5、ment of new IFIs in areas devoid of financial services; linking IFIs/MFIs to banks; strengthening Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as promoters of good practices; and, in a nonrepressive policy environment, promoting appropriate legal forms, prudential regulation and delegated supervision. Key
6、words: Microfinance, microcredit, microsavings。1. informal finance, self-help groups In March 1967, on one of my first field trips in Liberia, I had the opportunity to observe a group of a dozen Mano peasants cutting trees in a field belonging to one of them. Before they started their work, they pla
7、ced hoe-shaped masks in a small circle, chanted words and turned into animals. One turned into a lion, another one into a bush hog, and so on, and they continued to imitate those animals throughout the whole day, as they worked hard on their land. I realized I was onto something serious, and at the
8、end of the day, when they had put the masks into a bag and changed back into humans, I started asking questions. I learned that they worked as a group, tackling the fields of each one in turn, carrying out all the tasks performed by men. For the activities attributed to the female sex, the women org
9、anized their own group (Seibel, 1967). During subsequent visits to each of the 17 ethnic groups in Liberia over extensive periods in the two years that followed, I continued to ask questions. The study started with group work; it ended with informal finance. All over Liberia, I found people forming
10、self-help groups in which each person regularly contributed equal amounts of something valuable: labor, rice, money or other items. Among the Gbandi, Loma and Kissi in the northeast, you could still find masses of twisted iron rods, with one flat and one round end, the so-called Kissi pennies. This
11、was once the local currency before the Americo-Liberians introduced the US dollar. In all of these groups, one participant at a time received the accumulated total which he could use for his own individual benefit: to fell trees with the help of a rotating work group, to feed a wedding party with th
12、e rice accumulated by a rice savings group, or as microenterprise working capital provided by a rotating savings group. A cycle was considered to be complete when each member had received the total once over. A new cycle could then start with the same or a different membership. Accumulating and real
13、locating labor, rice and money are three seemingly different forms of economic cooperation. Yet in the eyes of a peasant whom I met in the Ivory Coast in 1985, they are all about financial intermediation: Le travail, cest notre argent! In Ghana, in 1979, I saw groups of women jointly producing palm-
14、oil which they sold on the market, allocating the proceeds to one member of the group at a time. Most of these groups also provided social insurance by allocating scarce resources, out of turn, to members in emergency situations. In the early days this consisted mainly of food items, whereas nowaday
15、s it is usually money. With the expansion of the money economy, these informal financial institutions (IFIs) have not lost their vigor. Quite to the contrary, they have multiplied, both in number and diversity. Banks, with their inappropriate products and practices, have not prevented the IFIs from
16、spreading. In many instances, even the staff of commercial and central banks (as in the case of Bank Indonesia) have been found to participate. Some banks have even adopted the financial technologies used, such as daily deposit collection adopted by Bank Dagang Bali in Indonesia and by the Northern
17、Mindanao Development Bank in the Philippines. 2.From Traditional Organizations to Microfinance My first studies in the 1960s were devoted to traditional organizations (Seibel & Massing, 1974), a term which, at best, evoked the interest of anthropologists. During the 1970s, technical assistance agenc
18、ies rediscovered these organizations under an old name used by Raiffeisen a hundred years earlier: self-help groups (Seibel & Damachi, 1982). In the mid-1980s, they changed into informal financial institutions (Seibel & Marx, 1987). Finally, in 1990, inspired by the 1989 World Bank Conference on Mic
19、roenterprises, I proposed to the Economics Institute in Boulder, Colorado, that it offer part of its program in World Banking and Finance under the heading of Microfinance, comprising both microsavings and microcredit (Seibel, 1996). This new term reflects the fact that it becomes increasingly diffi
20、cult to clearly distinguish between formal and nonformal origins and practices. 3.Dhikuti, the Small Businessmans Self-help Finance Company There are numerous other forms of institutional upgrading to be found worldwide. In Nepal, institutional upgrading has taken a different route. Until the 1950s,
21、 the dikur or dhikuti was a simple rotating savings association among Thakali traders. Since then, it has spread throughout all towns and most ethnicities in Nepal and become the small businessmans self-help bank (Seibel & Shrestha, 1988). As business opportunities grew and money became scarce, secr
22、et bidding (widespread also in the Chinese hui and the Vietnamese ho) replaced allocation by lottery. For example, at the first turn, the lowest bidder may accept a pot of $1000 for $600, reducing individual contributions by 40% or putting the balance of $400 into an emerging loan fund. In response
23、to a new law permitting the establishment of finance companies, the first dhikuti have now started to register as finance companies and this has substantially altered the traditional pattern of rotating savings and credit. The most prominent of these is the Himalaya Finance and Savings Company, whic
24、h offers various savings and credit products to the poor and near-poor throughout Nepal, including contractual savings and term finance. At one point, up to 600 daily savings collectors collected deposits of US$ 0.15 per day, before new central bank regulations led to a reduction in the number of co
25、llectors and an increase in deposit amounts. (Seibel & Schrader, 1999) 4.Financial Service Associations (FSAs): an Option Pioneered by IFAD The concept and development of Financial Service Associations (FSAs) is an IFAD innovation built on the principles of indigenous non-rotating savings and credit
26、 associations: proximity, local financial intermediation, ownership and self-management by the poor, self-reliance, and sustainability. With a view to promoting cost-effective delivery of financial services at the village level in areas devoid of banking facilities, IFAD first introduced this model
27、in the Republic of South Africa in 1994, followed by the Republic of Congo in 1996, and in the Republics of Guinea and Benin in 1997. Introduction of the model in Ghana, particularly in the northern regions with sparse rural banking facilities, is being planned. The FSA model avoids use of external
28、funds by mobilizing local savings in the form of equity and transforming them into small loans to shareholders for quick turnaround activities. The salient features of the FSA model are as follows: (a) Proximity. An FSA is a joint stock company with a variable capital that is owned and operated by s
29、hareholders, who are local residents. (b) Savings. Mobilization of local savings as equity or stock, rather than demand deposits. Local resource accumulation and security of savings are major incentives for buying shares. (c) Accounting. Record keeping, including the annual closing of accounts, is d
30、one locally by the FSA itself.Accounting and administrative procedures are simplified, transparent and based on local practices and experience. (d) Management Autonomy. All decisions are taken and carried out by shareholders themselves including creditworthiness examinations. There is no ceiling on
31、the number of shares held by a member; but no shareholder can have more than 10 votes in the General Assembly where all major management decisions are made. (e) Controls. The mechanisms for internal and external controls constitute a coherent whole that facilitates the rapid attainment of autonomy a
32、nd self-regulation. (f) Profitability. The shareholders themselves define the FSAs strategy for profit generation; concern fo profitability is an integral part of all decision-making. (g) Lending Operations. FSA mobilizes financial resources in the form of equity, from within its area of operations,
33、 for investment back into the area. The main financial product of the FSA is represented by small very short-term loans that can foster the socio-economic promotion of at least 80% of the membership. Its offer of financial services may be expanded but only after participatory analysis both of the co
34、sts of credit and of ways to attain an acceptable trade-off between the financial health of the FSA and the profitability to borrowers. (h) Sustainability. The members define their own strategies for risk management, for constituting reserves, for remunerating capital and for making allocations for
35、operating costs, bad debt provisioning and the preservation of the value of capital against inflation. (i) Networking. The creation of FSAs is able to stimulate the emergence of local institutions and networks providing central services to the FSAs. As intermediaries, FSAs are able to facilitate acc
36、ess by formal financial institutions to the rural markets.Thus, the FSA concept is a flexible microfinance model for delivery of low-cost financial services to rural areas by establishing village-level financial structures that are initiated, owned, and operated by villagers themselves. It represent
37、s yet another solution to the lack of interaction between formal and informal financial entities. (The World Bank & IFAD and Tounessi, 2000) 5.Linkage Banking At their own initiative (and sometimes aided by consultancy proposals), informal financial institutions have entered into numerous linkages,
38、mostly depositing sayings in cooperatives and banks. But being informal, these institutions had great difficulty in accessing credit from those banks or cooperatives. This is where Asia Pacific Rural and Agricultural Credit Association (APRACA), a Bangkok-based association of central and rural-agric
39、ultural banks in Asia and the Pacific, intervened. An increasing number of member institutions, such as Bank Indonesia, Landbank in the Philippines, National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) in India and Bank for Agriculture and Agricultural Cooperatives (BAAC) in Thailand, have e
40、ncouraged banks and NGOs to cooperate, on the commercial terms, with existing financial self-help groups (Ghate, 1992; Kropp, et al., 1989; Seibel & Parhusip, 1992; Seibel, 1996), thereby reducing the transaction costs of lenders and borrowers as well as deposit takers and depositors. This has worke
41、d well in Asian countries where policy frameworks have favored financial innovations, cost-covering interest rates and institutional viability. In Africa, where policy environments are unfavorable, or less stable, as in Nigeria, APRACAs sister organization, African Rural and Agricultural Credit Asso
42、ciation (AFRACA) found it more difficult to promote linkage banking. However, some of its member institutions, such as Caisse Nationale du Credit Agricole (CNCA) in Burkina Faso, Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) in Zimbabwe, and the Central Bank of Nigeria, have undertaken promising initiative
43、s. In Ghana, the World Bank, IFAD and the African Development Bank are preparing a new initiative of linking indigenous savings and credit associations, the so-called susu clubs, and daily deposit collectors to banks. 6.NGOs as Promoters of Good Practices NGOs can play a special role in the promotio
44、n of sound microfinancial institutions (MFI). They can disseminate information and organize exposure training programs, such as the one provided by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. Through training, they can assist small institutions in improving their viability and upgrade their legal status, as req
45、uired. They can also initiate financial operations which, in many countries, preclude deposit collection. But if they are seriously interested in financial operations, they should register as a rural or commercial bank, finance company or savings and credit cooperative. Among those that have success
46、fully embarked on this road are, to name a few: BancoSol in Bolivia, Bank Purba Danarta and numerous other NGO banks in Indonesia, and Center for Agriculture and Rural Development (CARD) Rural Bank in the Philippines (Seibel & Torres 1999). NGOs may propagate good microfinance practices (but not bes
47、t practices, which evoke notions of universally valid optimal solutions). Good practices are crucial to the sustainability of microfinance services. They may comprise: * the mobilization of internal resources for institutional self-reliance through savings collection, higher interest rates on loans,
48、 share capital, profits and insurance premiums * the promotion of microsavings as a source of microenterprise or farm household self-financing, including voluntary withdrawable savings, time deposits,mandatory regular savings, lottery savings, and daily savings collection on doorsteps * appropriate
49、microcredit products with small loan sizes growing according to repayment performance and absorptive capacity, mostly short maturities and installments according to customer capacity, insistence on timely repayment, and market rates of interest covering the costs of each product * microinsurance products contributing to loan security,such as life, health, cattle insurance * product reciprocity, tying credit to savings and insurance, to enhance financial discipl
