After months of feature development, data migration, and extensive training and preparations, ENDA reached a significant milestone today as they began rolling out Mifos at their first branch as part of a five branch pilot before deploying across their remaining 45 branches. 

ENDA, one of the MENA region's most exemplary MFIs serving more than 75,000 clients, has come a long way in utilizing the Mifos technology to drive their strategic goals.  To fully automate their operations and drive their rapid growth throughout Tunisia, ENDA required deep customization and new feature development for their deployment, including localization into French, enhanced support for individual lending through the teller model as well as group lending with individual monitoring.

Much thanks goes out to the entire staff at ENDA, the development team at ThoughtWorks, Grameen-Jameel, and our own program manager, Ryan Whitney, who has been out in the field stewarding the deployment and ensuring its success.  The persistence and initiative demonstrated by everyone has enabled not only this success at ENDA but a broad array of benefits for the global Mifos community including documentation, training guides, new features, and plenty of lessons learned.  

The pilot program should be complete by December with all 50 branches targeted to be running fully in production by early April 2009.  This is only just the beginning for ENDA as they look to Mifos to spur their growth, extend innovative service offerings to their clients, and integrate systems and technologies to better reach the poor.