Leveraging the Cooperative Infrastructure: Potential for Delivering Microfinance Services

11:47: Cooperative banks were the first; NABARD promotes connections between SHGs & cooperative banks. We’re trying to get people to open accounts with banks.

11:48: Cooperative banks are involved in the MFI sector; SHGs 15% accounts are in coop banks in the country. WB, AP, Karnataka, Maharashtra have taken the lead, but it’s not enough. There are 14,000 coop bank branches;  including urban branches would be 18,000, and a huge number of cooperative federations, MACs; if all of them are involved, there’s great potential available for MFI

11:50: 3% => 6.84% NPA level has risen; we should be keep it low :/

11:51: MFIs borrowed from coop banks in the 90s. NABARD encourages this?

11:52: Most banks go into CBS in March 2013

11:54: The Rabbobank delegate is talking about her take on cooperatives.

11:58: A lot of cooperatives fail—management is key. They need liquidity management, financial products that make sense/are safe, auditing, economies of scale.

12:01: You can’t just build a strong cooperative with poor people—you need a mixed membership base

12.03: Client knowledge is key takeaway from bottom up organization! So are incentives, relationships

12:05: Poor people only have credit as their assets. Well, one poor lady said that, so it must be true.

12:08: Clip of a lady saying that Mann Deshi helped her/solved all her life problems. So of course it’s true for everyone.

12:09: Poor have markets for everything else, but not finance. Weird/not entirely true.

12:15: Girls are saving for their education!! Women are so progressive!

12:16: Listen to your members & observe what they are doing. BUT MAKE SURE TO HAVE A REPRESENTATIVE SAMPLE FROM WHICH YOU GENERALIZE.

12:17: IFAD representative is talking. Rural Microfinance, range of financial services & institutions should be promoted.

12:22: Financial organizations really need to grow locally, and improve financial inclusion that way. Phone banking is a really good way to do this! There is an optimal level of centralization of the governance structure.

12:24 : Financial inclusion services need to go beyond credit. PREACH.

12:26: A lot of cooperatives rely on fees for capital, there are no funders. Womp womp.

12:27: State banking act restricts cooperatives to operation within a small geographic area, there is a bureaucracy that is corrupt and hard to work with.

12:28: “Sometimes when you set up a bank, you have to break the law”…UHH.I don’t know if you should say that on the record.

12:35: Should there be parallel cooperative societies acts or state cooperative societies acts?

12:40: Fin.