Mifos Chapters
Join or start a local chapter to grow your own Mifos community!
Take ownership of your local Mifos community and help create a world of 3 Billion Maries!
Mifos chapters are volunteer-driven groups that promote technology-enabled financial inclusion and empower their local communities to use, collaborate, build, and grow the Mifos X platform together.
The primary goal of our network of local Mifos Chapters is to allow you, the members of the community, to take ownership of your local community, and start building out the face to face interactions and collaboration that will help our global community thrive and grow.
Our Mifos Chapters come together to educate their region on the power of Mifos X and technology-enabled financial inclusion, to personally connect with and integrate new users into our global community, to collaborate and support each other through training and knowledge transfer, to innovate by identify and building out new solutions, and to inspire others to achieve our mission by donating and volunteering.
Chapter Charter
We are all united by the same mission, to create a world of 3 Billion Maries by bringing financial inclusion to the poor and unbanked through the Mifos X technology platform. While each local chapter will have its own unique set of objectives and activities it carries out to achieve this mission, these are some of the goals your chapter might set out to achieve:
Chapter Goals
Educate
- Awareness – to build awareness of Mifos X and the transformative power of technology for financial inclusion
- Community – to welcome and invite others to become a part of our global Mifos community.
- Advocacy – To advocate the value and benefits of using open source technologies like Mifos X for scaling financial inclusion.
Connect
- Unity – To unify and connect the many individuals across the region in one central place.
- Networking – to allow financial inclusion providers to find local support partners and peers to share their ideas with.
- Knowledge – to grow professionally by hosting local speakers and visiting local sites/events as a group
- Demand – To recruit and bring together groups of MFIs and local networks and associations to collectively generate demand for Mifos X.
- Socialize – To socialize and bond with fellow community members
- Showcase – to showcase and tell the stories of success and value that extend across our community and ecosystem.
Collaborate
- Support – to support your fellow financial inclusion providers by sharing knowledge and firsthand experiences.
- Voice – to listen to and collectively capture the local needs and requirements for incorporation into the global product roadmap
- Training – a physical place for users of the software to come together for workshops and training sessions to increase their proficiency in using the Mifos X software.
Innovate
- Discovery – to identify the needs for new features and innovations that can extend our platform from the ground up.
- Brainstorming – to seek out creative solutions and ways to optimize the product and grow our community.
- Action – to organize and host hackathons, sprints, and other events to turn ideas into action and produce code, documentation, and more to benefit the community.
- Partnerships – to forge partnerships with like-minded organization and groups that can mutually advance our mission.
Inspire
- Fundraising – for some of our chapters that aren’t located in-country nearby our users, help grow the initiative by organizing campaigns for financial support.
- Volunteerism – to recruit new volunteers and introduce them to the many opportunities to be a part of making our vision a reality.
- Evangelization – to evangleize our initiative and the benefits of open source technologies in scaling responsible financial inclusion.
Forming a Chapter
- Send a request to start up a Mifos chapter by filling out this online form.
- Schedule your first meeting and promote it locally amongst other groups.
- Host your first meeting and adopt your Chapter Charter
- Appoint or elect the leadership committee for your local chapter.
- Set up a mailing list for chapter communications
- Set up an online calendar and post a regular schedule of meetings.
Resources
- Best Practices for Starting up a Chapter
- These are a compilation from notes at the summit. Make sure to add you own lessons and advice here. (link coming soon)
- OpenHatch Mailing List to Discuss Event Best Practices – http://lists.openhatch.org/events
- NetSquared Organizer’s Handbook – http://organizershandbook.wikispaces.com/Quickstart+1-pager
- A great resource for starting local groups.
