A 2-day workshop with real-life microfinance case studies, for World Bank and other staff working for funding agencies

• Are you faced with a design decision on microfinance?
• Have you inherited a project with a rural microfinance activity?
• Are you interested to know what microfinance can and cannot do for your clients?
• Are you just curious about all the buzz about with microfinance these days?
• Do you wonder how understanding microfinance could make you better at your job and offer more value to your partners?

If you answered YES to any of these questions, here is an operational course designed just for you.

CGAP, the World Bank's Latin America and Carribean Region and Finance and Financial and Private Sector Development, Vice Presidencies, along with the Microfinance Management Institute (www.themfmi.org), will offer a two-day workshop on microfinance tailored to the needs of funder agency staff.

The aim of the workshop is to present microfinance best practices and how to make them operational. The primary audience for the workshop is non-microfinance specialist staff who currently have or will in the future face operational issues as they include microfinance within their projects. The training will present many of the new trends and tools in microfinance, including new actors, products, delivery mechanisms and innovations.

To give non-specialist operational staff practice in making microfinance-related strategic and operational decisions, the workshop will guide participants as they put best practices to work on real-life cases. This course will dig deep into operational concepts with a microfinance institution case study, looking at ratios and benchmarks and qualitative aspects - to see the ingredients of sustainable microfinance. The role of donors like the Bank will be discussed - including what goes right and what to avoid, with presentations by task team leaders who have been there already.

The trainers are very familiar with funder agency operations -- the pressures, challenges and operational issues. They'll help you find resources as well as creative solutions to the problems you raise.

So open your calendar for May 6 and 7, and sign up for this course before others beat you to it!

The workshop cost for non-World Bank employees is $900. To sign up, please email dcabbar@worldbank.org.

For more information about the CGAP/MFMI funder courses, see http://www.themfmi.org/course/index.php.