Armed only with my rapier wit (and a little help from
Google Translator) I once again ventured out into the world of international
microcredit investing a la
MicroPlace. So far I have been mainly looking at
MFIs operating in countries in which
Kiva does not have any field partners. Today I started out by looking at
AE&I (
Afrique Emergence &
Investissements), an
MFI that operates in Cote
D'Ivorie but passed them up after finding out that
Kiva had some rather unfortunate dealings with them. So I moved on to
Banco da Família (website in Portuguese) which operates in the southern states of Brazil.
Banco da Família seems to be doing so pretty good work and won the
2006 Certificate of Transparency from the
Mix Market, which is kind of the
de facto clearing house for
microfinance information (I'm sure we'll be revisiting the Mix Market on another blog post).
Personally I find trying to wrap my head around the poverty levels in South and Central America has always a little tricky. The poverty in Africa, the region that I think requires the most help by far, is obvious to the point where it basically punches you in the face, proverbially speaking. A lot of South and Central American countries have decent per
capita GDP numbers, but this hides some pretty massive wealth
discrepancies. For some reason, it's almost impossible to find median GDP numbers for any country even though that would seem to be a much more useful number. There are some ways to measure wealth
discrepancy though, the most popular is probably the
Gini coefficient.
Gini coefficients vary between 0 and 1, with zero representing perfect equality and a 1 indicating that a single person has all the wealth. Real life coefficients range around 0.25 for the
Scandanavian countries to 0.70 in a few countries in sub-Saharan Africa. The U.S. has a rather high coefficient around 0.47. Brazil's
Gini coefficient is a whopping 0.59 which is one of the highest outside of Africa. So, although Brazil's per
capita GDP (
PPP) is around $9,500 it is important to keep in mind that this amount is very unevenly distributed.
Anyway that is enough
econo-
nerdiness for now. My $250 is on its winding way to
Banco da Família. This note is offered by
Oikocredit, a major
microcredit financier based in the Netherlands who is the other intermediary on
MicroPlace. Now that I've invested $500, you will soon see a post detailing the awesomeness of my handcrafted artisan piggybank from MicroPlace.
Well, this weekend my piggy bank from Microplace arrived and I am obvious very excited. This little guy was hand crafted by Lucia Valdez at the Comparte workshop in Pomaire, Chile. I did a little sniffing around the Internet and found that you can in fact get your very own piglet at Ten Thousand Villages, which offers products from some thirty artisan groups from Africa, Asia, and Latin America.