ThitsaWorks Takes Mifos to Myanmar

The following is a guest post from May Thu Myint, Communications Officer of ThitsaWorks, Inc.

Hello Mifos community!

We’d like to take this moment to introduce ourselves. We are ThitsaWorks, the first Mifos partner to be based in Myanmar. We are delighted to be a part of this great community. We’d like to take this moment to tell you about what we’ve been up to lately.

October was a busy month for ThitsaWorks as we began meeting with various organizations to begin formally introducing ourselves to the MFI community here.

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Embracing Electronic Money with the Central Bank of Ecuador

Between the 10th and 15th October, our Latam Team was in Ecuador where many things happened.

Quito’s Chapter is taking form and is preparing to host its first meeting. Ma. Luisa Martínez, our Account Manager for Latin America, worked on this throughout the week with Jorge Moncayo, Central Bank of Ecuador’s Financial Inclusion Director and Chairman of Quito’s Chapter.

They started to set the objectives and mission of the Chapter itself and also invited some potential members.

This Chapter not only will develop and discuss about our platform, but it will be a Social Innovation and Technology Hub, where fintechs, developers, innovators, Academia, and subject matter experts can have a seat at the table to discuss, share experiences, work on solutions, and create papers and case studies about Financial Inclusion, Social Innovation and Technology.

Our Strategic Initiatives Director for Latin America, Javier Borkenztain, was a speaker at the International Seminar “Central Bank challenges in the XXI century” hosted and organized by the Central Bank of Ecuador.

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Star Contributor of the Month – Rajan Maurya

We’re recognizing Rajan Maurya, recent GSOC graduate, from Delhi as our Star Contributor. Rajan didn’t wait a moment to continue excelling as a contributor even as GSOC concluded. He has continued his development and bug fixing for the Android field officer app and has graciously helped to mentor any new contributor that has come along. He has also taken the initiative to lead the Android Self-Service App by putting in place a strong architecture and guiding fellow volunteers to contribute. It’s been a pleasure to work with Rajan to see how tirelessly he dedicates himself to the Mifos community at all hours of the night. Join us in congratulating Rajan and follow his lead so you too can be recognized as Star Contributor in an upcoming month. 
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Partner Spotlight – Singo Africa

This regular blog series will shine the light on some of our top Partners. Not only do we want to recognize them for their accomplishments, we want others to learn from the approach they’ve taken to promote and implement Mifos.

Mifos Partners are one of the most crucial links in our community – they are the driving force that is promoting and supporting Mifos worldwide.  Aside from championing our product and bringing the Mifos technology to new markets, they act as the fundamental bridge feeding in MFI requirements to be developed by the community. Partners don’t stop there as many are also developing and localizing the product to fit their local market.  For all these reasons, we focus our full energy on making Partners successful – they are the primary channel to market, the eyes and ears on the ground, and the entrepreneurial force that will help us sustainably scale. We’d love to recognize your partner organization in this monthly spotlight so please reach out if you’d like to be featured.

Singo Africa Limited has been a Mifos partner since August of 2015, bringing their experience deploying IT solutions in the banking and manufacturing industries to the microfinance and SACCO sector. In that time, they’ve quickly made Mifos a recognizable name in Tanzania, promoting the system to more than 70% of the market. They were recently certified by the Registrar of Cooperatives as a Certified Service Provider to the Cooperative Societies with Mifos as the audited solution.

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On the Road in Indonesia …

While in Indonesia for a series of meetings, I had the chance to do my very first site visit for Mifos.

Our host, the Koperasi Kasih Indonesia, welcomed us at their head office in northern Jakarta nearby the container port.

We spent some time with the team to talk about the Koperasi and the procedures and tools they are currently using. Their goal to grow comes with a need to scale their business procedures and make them more efficient, which leads to better support by a back office solution, and the need to eliminate most of the paper intensive work in the field and the inefficient  manual data transfer in the office. By then just words to me.

KKI invited us to take part in a group meeting held at a member’s house … so we hopped on a scooter and off we went.

20160921_130003As we arrived, the group already has gathered and was waiting for us. You could feel happiness and tension all around as the purpose of the meeting was to start a new cycle and disburse loans. The meeting started with a prayer and the KKI pledge shouted by all attendees (including us) in unison.

20160921_132134Then some rustling noise appeared … paper magically came out of nowhere. For me it was hard to believe: attendance lists, application forms (of every member), ID card copies, disbursement sheets, and agreement forms. Given that the meeting was a joint meeting of two groups, there were over 50! pages of paper, at least.

The formal meeting started with an attendance check, followed by an educational training session. After the training, four members were tested to verify that they have understood the purpose of the Koperasi and the meaning of group liability and their own responsibility for the group and all other members.

One group welcomed a new member; she recited the policies aloud, and showed her “Fra20160921_135818me of Dreams” to all. What is a “Frame of Dream” you may ask. It is a blank surface that every member needs to fill with the goals she wants to reach, e.g. education for her children, better housing, or growth of her small enterprise.

This frame is shown to every member of the group because they are now all responsible for these goals (shared liability taken to the next level). The frame serves two purposes, (1) a self-motivation for the member, and (2) an agreement that everybody cares about the dream of all other group members.

Suddenly action entered the room and all attendees started to move around and lined up: disbursement time was here. Every member, one by 20160921_140904one, was sitting in front of KKI’s employee, the loan amount was stated out loud, and then cash was counted and handed over. Every member then signed off the payment in the disbursement sheet and the agreement form.

20160921_140926The closing of the meeting included a prayer and the KKI pledge again.

My take away after that experience is two-fold. There are two ingredients that make this kind of business work, (1) a social component where everybody is responsible for each other and (2) and the technology that allows a broader outreach by easing the pain of handling paper.

Cash, even if we Westerners are moving away from it, still has some value. It is something you can feel, which is more than simply the money itself. There is some hidden message in cash that could not be erased by electronic money, a transition needs to be made to distinguish between money and expectations/feelings.  

As a techie, my first reaction was that we can solve all this with decent technology. After seeing what really happens, I realized that technology can not replace a group meeting, rather technology needs to assist the social bonding by providing a solution that allows the employee to focus more on the group, instead of handling large amounts of paper, and other mundane details and error checking.

Technology needs to enhance the social experience, not replace it.

-Markus Geiss, Chief Architect