MicroPlace, Parte Dois

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.