Objective: To catalyze the creation of a large-scale and profitable microfinance industry in India.

Commitment: The alliance has established a goal of delivering microfinance services to 15 million of India’s under-privileged by 2015. We will approach the goal from multiple directions:

ACCION will focus on helping commercial-origin entities (e.g. banks, finance companies) extend microfinance services to India’s working poor. ACCION’s goal is five million clients.

Unitus will focus on accelerating the growth of nonprofit/NGO-origin MFIs, transforming them to regulated, for-profit financial institutions, and connecting them to local capital markets. Unitus’s goal is 10 million clients.

Background: Unitus is a global microfinance accelerator – formed in the last five years by a group of business leaders who carefully studied the issues of poverty reduction and found a way to significantly improve the existing microfinance industry. Like a for-profit venture capital firm, we work to identify the highest-potential MFIs in developing countries and help accelerate their growth through capital investments and capacity-building consulting, thus empowering them to help exponentially more poor people worldwide. .As of July 2005, Unitus has seven MFI partners worldwide serving more than 422,000 poor clients.

ACCION International is a private, nonprofit organization with the mission of giving people the financial tools they need – microenterprise loans, business training, and other financial services – to work their way out of poverty. ACCION International’s partner microfinance institutions today are providing loans as low as $100 to poor women and men entrepreneurs in 20 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean and sub-Saharan Africa, and in the U.S. Since 1992, ACCION and its partners have disbursed $7.6 billion in microloans to more than 4.7 million borrowers, 65 percent of whom are women.

The alliance will provide a permanent and sustainable approach for the continuous development of microfinance services throughout the country. ACCION will assist commercial entities such as banks and finance companies in extending microfinance products and services and providing technical assistance and training. Unitus, a microfinance accelerator acting as a social venture capitalist, will identify high-potential NGO microfinance institutions (MFIs) and speed their growth through grants, capacity-building consulting, and capital investments. Unitus is currently working with five MFI partners in India, namely SKS, BSS, ASA-GV, Bandhan and Grameen Koota.

Update:
October 21, 2005:
We held a formal grand opening ceremony for the India Microfinance Center in Bangalore. The event was attended by over 100 professionals interested in the development of the microfinance industry. Additionally, ACCION and Unitus senior management traveled to India to meet with formal private-sector banks in Hyderabad, New Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai and to increase their interest and activity in the MFI space.

March 2006: 1. ACCION India recently completed a microfinance business planning exercise with a leading commercial financial institution, TVS Finance and Services, a subsidiary of one of the most prestigious Indian corporations, TV Sundaram (TVS) Group. A long-term business plan to enable TVS F&S to establish large-scale urban microfinance business in Chennai was developed. The TVS/ACCION project will offer individual microenterprise loans—a first for the region. 2. ACCION India has launched a long-term technical assistance partnership with Swadhaar Finaccess, a start-up microfinance institution (MFI) in Mumbai, to bring microenterprise loans to women in the slums of the city. In addition, Swadhaar will break the mold of traditional MFIs by offering small consumer loans to factory workers that need to finance school fees or other family necessities.