Hanoi: Binh Minh's annual party

This morning, I went to Dong Anh 930km north of Hanoi) to attend our local partner Binh Minh’s annual party for its clients. The party was held in an auditorium in Dong Anh (a province 40km north of Hanoi where Binh Minh currently operates) and there were 1,000 clients celebrating the success of the program . Binh Minh was giving out gifts to the clients.
I never did figure out what were in those boxes! But the animators did think it was funny to invite me on stage several times to accounce the names of the winners. Of course, I would just mutiliate their names with my terrible toned Vietnamese which was evidently very funny!?

Binh Minh currently has 3,600 clients as of December 2006. EDM would like to help Binh Minh achieve 15,000 clients by 2010. While we are still negotiating our partnership, EDM intends to give technical support and provide loan capital to Binh Minh during the course of 2007 in order to facilitate Binh Minh’s expansion (see blog entry: Introduction) to understand the benefits of a partnersip with local operators). During the year, we will also be preparing for an individual loan pilot project, which will be launched once Binh Minh has achieved financial sustainability (likely January 2008). The idea behind such a project is that there is very limited access to microfinance loans for poor individuals beyond the state bank loans for the poor. While the state bank loans have very low interest rates, they are not very attractive to the poorer populations as the repayments are annual and the borrowers can not always get a second loan after the first loan. It is very hard for a small petty trader to pay back a lump sum at one time; weekly repayment schedules are much more user friendly as the client can pay back the loan over time and can then take out a new loan to continue to support their business. There are only a few NGOs or microfinance operators offering such products but the majority of the products are offered to groups of borrowers (group solidarity methodology). Again, market vendors and petty traders do not necessarily want to join a group of their competitors to borrow money, nor do they want to be responsible for their group members default (as is the case for group solidarity methodology).