Why here?

The company I work for (Opportunity International) have teamed up with the biggest micro-finance operation in Rwanda, called Urwego. Urwego means "Ladder" in Kinya-Rwanda. Urwego have 30,000 clients. A big operation in the micro-finance world, but just scratching the surface of the population here that could benefit.

Urwego just did loans. The new OI-Urwego operation will be a full bank, offering loans, savings & current accounts, term deposits etc. With tellers, vaults and lots of branches.

The loans will be as before - the core products will be "trust bank" loans - which are a single loan to a group of people. Here it's 30 people per group, typically. Each member has a proposal for how they will use their share of the money, and the bank helps them develop that idea. The group manage themselves to make sure each member pays back their due amounts. So on the banks books, there is one loan, but it helps 30 families. This is done to reduce the banks overhead - a level of "trust" is given to the group to manage their affairs and pay back the loan.

Typical in the micro finance world, most of the clients are women, since they make the best poverty-fighters; sending their children to school, improving the families nutrition and usually repaying better. They may do dress-making, wholesale (e.g. buying big bags of rice and dividing into smaller sizes), agriculture, food preparation etc.

And a typical group loan here will be for 16 weeks, and between 30-100 quid per group member. Repayment rates are far higher (say 96%) than in for loans in the developed world - there is much more motivation. And the bank gives a lot of support & training on how to build a business and manage money.

So, my work here is to make sure the banking software & systems needed are built, tested and trained out. I'm taking over from some other guys who built most of the system, but there were some differences of opinion about how it was going and they had to leave before completing it. For a project like this, it would typically take a year from start to finish, but I'm just here for the last 3 months of it.