To celebrate National Volunteer Week, we wanted to take the opportunity to thank all our volunteers and put out a call for more support from new volunteers who want to partake in movement to create a world of 3 Billion Maries. Our volunteers and their tireless commitment to Mifos have helped the community as it's transitioned from Grameen Foundation to leadership under the Community for Open Source Microfinance.  As we look to grow our community throughout 2012 and beyond there are many ways to get involved - it's not just software development, we need help buiding community, fundraising, marketing, and more.  

Head over to the COSM blog to read how you can get involved.

Grameen Foundation is pleased to announce the transition plan for the Mifos Initiative. The Mifos software will be held by The Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and The Community for Open Source Microfinance (COSM) will manage the ongoing development and growth of the platform and community.

The Mifos software licenses, copyrights, trademarks and other assets will be held by The Software Freedom Conservancy, a not-for-profit organization that helps promote, improve, develop, and defend Free, Libre, and Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects. SFC’s role is to hold and protect the open source licenses; product decisions will be made by the community through the Mifos Council, a group of stakeholders and participants from the community who will govern and oversee the product. 

COSM is being led by Edward Cable, one of the original members of the Mifos team who since 2007 has focused on cultivating the community. COSM is a non-profit foundation, formed to steward the open source project and unite our entire community of users, specialists, and contributors in their collaborative efforts to continue the adoption and development of Mifos. 

We will be posting more details of the transition in the coming days. Please read the full announcement on the COSM website to learn more. 

We are announcing that Grameen Foundation USA will be exiting its activities related to Mifos^®.  Over the coming months we will make a concerted effort to transition the initiative to leaders in the Mifos community.  Though this has been a very difficult business decision, we are confident that this is the best approach for Mifos to achieve long-term success.

Grameen Foundation launched the Mifos initiative in 2006 to address a critical need for a solid technology platform tailored to the needs of the microfinance community. Our goal has been to provide software that can promote growth and transparency in microfinance and achieve deep, lasting impact in the lives of poor people.

Since then, Mifos has become a robust open-source software platform that is used by microfinance institutions around the world.  As open-source software, Mifos has been supported by a global community of software developers, translators and users.

However, the challenges of running a global software business within a non-profit from the United States, combined with the expense of maintaining a substantial software development team, will not enable us to achieve our goals or to realize the potential of Mifos. Consequently, our leadership has decided that, over the coming months, Grameen Foundation will transition out of this business. Our direct involvement in Mifos will conclude at the end of November 2011.

Exciting news! We just announced new funding that will help expand our Technology for Microfinance Initiative and Mifos platform. The MasterCard Foundation has pledged $1.23 million to help fund our Mifos Consortium and Cisco Foundation has continued support of our platform with a grant of nearly $500,000.

Below are a few highlights from the release; visit www.grameenfoundation.org to view the full press release. Here are a few links to learn more about the work that we'll be expanding through this funding:

Check out the CGAP Technology Blog today to view a couple of our efforts we’re engaged with CGAP on to foster industry-wide discussion and collaboration to address technology for microfinance. We’re trying to shed light on the back-office information system as a critical enabler for the scale and impact of microfinance. George Conard's second guest post to the blog is now live. Entitled, Beyond Software: Investing in Complete Technology Management Solutions, it compels MFIs to look beyond software to consider human and business process factors to realize the full value of technology investment.

This post from George Conard, Executive Director of our Technology Microfinance Initiative, was originally posted on the Grameen Foundation "Creating a World without Poverty" Blog.

Over the past decade, technology has played a key role in Grameen Foundation’s mission to alleviate poverty. From equipping microfinance institutions with the capacity to manage technology to building and delivering industry-wide solutions like our Mifos software platform, our goal is to advance the use of technology across the microfinance industry. The driving force is our Technology for Microfinance Initiative which seeks to transform technology from a barrier into an accelerator for the growth and impact of microfinance.

Recently I had the chance to attend for the first time the Microfinance India Summit that took place in New Delhi on Oct 26 and 27. It was moving to see many of the sector’s finest throughout India brought together in one place. Interacting with all these MFIs, who demonstrated a continued need for technology-enabled outreach, was an invigorating way to kick off my trip throughout India that will take me to a number of MFIs who are in need of a complete technology management solution.