• MFI: Fantsuam Foundation, Kafanchan, Kaduna State, Nigeria
• Specialist: Gayl Kennedy, VSO Volunteer
  • Kelechi Micheals, Programs Operations Manager

Fantsuam Foundation was established in 1996 and commenced micro-finance operations in the Grameen model in 2001. It is based in Bayan Loco which is a peri-urban slum of Kafanchan, a small town which is the headquarters of its Local Government Area (Jema'a) in the south of Kaduna State, Nigeria.

Fantsuam's mission is to eliminate poverty and disadvantage through integrated development programmes which include health, ICT training, HIV/AIDS, national volunteering, cyber cafe and internet service provider and business development services, including microfinance and business development services training.

Currently Fantsuam has five field officers supporting almost 1,000 active group loan clients across 80 centres, and 50 individual loan clients. In addition over 400 individuals have savings accounts with the organisation. All loan clients receive health, HIV/AIDS and business development services training. Fantsuam Foundation has worked with over 15,000 clients since it started. 

Deployment Overview

Prior to deploying MIFOS, the organisation was completely paper based with a few spreadsheets to keep track of all the activity.  The need for a system to manage this was identified as part of an Organisational Development review of the Foundation.

Estimated Start Date	Actual Start Date	Status
June 2010	June 2010	Training and Rollout
Estimated End Date	Actual End Date
November 2010

The Schedule was driven by the fact that there was no data to electronically migrate, it all had to be entered from paper files. Maybe it could have been entered more efficiently into a spreadsheet for importing into the system rather than creating each client manually, but we did not have the technical resources or expertise to explore that route.   Also from a resource perspective there was one resource full time until data entry commenced.  Then the team increased to 3 but the resources were not very IT literate so tasks had to be broken down into chunks in a non optimal manner to keep it simple for them.

Pre-Deployment Analysis

Fantsuam MFI are working per the Grameen model so were surprised to find no link between savings and loans in Mifos, i.e. no check that adequate collateral is in place prior to disbursing loan, and not including savings in the expected collections / overdue amounts being tracked.  Savings do show in the bulk collection sheet but not in the amount outstanding.

Workarounds identified

• For some clients, there is no known date of birth but it is a required field so had to use a default date which could be excluded from reports, e.g. 1900.
• Individual savers (no loans) still needed to be set up with a meeting date and loan officer.  To overcome this we set up a generic Savings Clerk as a loan officer and gave all such clients a default meeting date of the end of the month. 
• APR –we used a 4 month period for cycle 1 and 6 months for the other cycles so we had a slightly different APR for cycle 1 as a result due to rounding (13.333%)  We adjusted the interest on the cycle 1 loan by a few Naira to make it consistent.

Downloadable Content: Weekly Project Schedule - Fantsuam Foundation (.pdf)

Configuration

Issues/Challenges

• Chart of accounts and and financial mappings took a lot of time to resolve.
• Documentation was not so clear especially on financial mappings (did not realise could only have 20 rows etc)

Infrastructure

• While waiting for new server to arrive / be installed, we were heavily dependent on the MIFOS online demo site which was slow given internet connectivity challenges.

Limitation in mifos test system that cannot disburse loan till next meeting day etc so had to change to weekly loans to circumvent this.  (No LSIM on demo site)

Reporting

Reporting was a challenge, both customized reports due to limited resources, and also ran into format issues with standard reports as not the same for version 1.6 as for previous versions.  New reports coming in Q4 2010 will reduce need for customized reports. In hindsight should not have started pilot without knowing reports were working correctly. 

Challenges

• Lack of more detailed information on what is stored in each table was a challenge when writing reports
• Due to issues with running reports, unable to determine how standard reports are to function, when they're to be run, etc. without detailed functional specifications available. 

Issues

• Many issues with standard reports and batch jobs not running appropriately that have been difficult to troubleshoot remotely
  • Branch Progress Report - Report wouldn't generate data due to issue with upper and lower case column names in the database and currency properties in BIRT report. Resolved after a month and a half and lengthy discussions on mailing list
  • General Ledger Report - unable to select branch and date were first errors and then data would not be displayed. 
  • Collection Sheet Report - report is blank when generated (currently being troubleshooted)
  • Branch Cash Confirmation Report - report is blank when generated (currently being troubleshooted)

Data Migration

After analyzing their data migration options, Fantsuam chose to manually migrate all active loans of start of pilot. All data was manually migrated and hand-entered into Mifos from paper files by a data entry staff of 3.

Lessons Learned:

• Manual data entry process was time consuming –ended up touching same client multiple times –to create, to approve, to add savings balances, to disburse loan, to add fees/arrears.  Could have been more efficient to have all info ready prior to moving it to Mifos.
• Some challenges encountered in data entry included missing paperwork, illegible hand writing, missing date of birth and education details, inconsistent spelling of client names and addresses, etc.

• Errors made can make the system messy as not all fields / notes / reports can be deleted.  Some can be made inactive, others will remain there and make it less clean of a UI / confusing if the note was incorrect etc. 

Training

Challenges

• Maintaining trained staff for data entry on ongoing basis is difficult. To ensure proper data integrity have implemented a "Mifos Aptitude Test" after basic field officer training consisting of 9 questions (5 involving finding data like # clients, loan disbursal date, etc. and 4 tasks such as creating a loan, disbursing a loan, entering collection sheet data, etc.
  • For example, one staff member got 98% while another got 39%.