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 Good Practice Guidelines E-book (802KB)
To help funding agency staff translate guidance into daily operations, CGAP has developed an e-book version of the Good Practice Guidelines for Funders of Microfinance. The e-book version of the Guidelines has the added feature of links to practical operational tools.
Download instructions: To view the Good Practice Guidelines E-book you will first need to download the Free DNL Reader
This should take a few seconds. You only need to download the viewer once. DNL files are data files, therefore, they are resistant to computer viruses.
Apple Macintosh users must have Virtual PC, or other Windows environment software, installed in order to view this file.
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The e-book is a work in progress and will be tested through June 2008. We invite you to explore the features and supplemental material the e-book presents. Your feedback, especially suggestions for improvements and priorities for additional operational tools needed, is welcome.
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Commitment to applying good practice in microfinance comes from the highest level within donor countries and agencies. In June 2004, the Group of Eight (G8) endorsed the Key Principles of Microfinance at the meeting of Heads of State in Sea Island, Georgia. These Principles were drawn up by CGAP, a consortium of 33 members--including bilateral, multilateral, and private donors--committed to building more inclusive financial systems for the poor.
Promoting good practice in microfinance has also been a cornerstone of CGAP's aid effectiveness work. The Microfinance Donor Peer Reviews, launched by CGAP donor members in 2002, addressed aid effectiveness from the perspective of agencies' internal procedures, processes and systems. In February 2004, the heads of the participating 17 international development agencies discussed the outcome of the peer reviews and underscored the importance they place on improved aid effectiveness in building inclusive financial systems. They agreed on a Joint Memorandum, and a program of work to update and codify the existing good practice guidelines on microfinance.
The Good Practice Guidelines for Funders of Microfinance build on this high-level commitment, providing practical guidance for donor staff on how to best interact with and support the various actors in microfinance.
The most important aspect of the updated Good Practice Guidelines, which build on the CGAP III strategy, and the G8 Key Principles, is how it gets operationalized within our agencies. The peer review process has taught us that policy papers of all kinds are difficult to integrate into the hearts and minds of our colleagues. Our big challenge going forward is to translate the guidelines into action at the country-level. For this purpose, we developed a PowerPoint presentation that you can use to present the new Guidelines to your colleagues, staff, etc.
Following a highly participatory process, the guidelines were drafted and preliminarily endorsed at the CGAP annual meeting in November 2004. They were then widely disseminated in several languages, field-tested during 18 months, including interviews with donor staff to gather feedback on their relevance and usefulness. The second edition of the Guidelines, integrates the suggestions of 20 CGAP member donors and 10 other civil society organizations and individuals in order to balance all views.
For any questions, please contact Jasmina Glisovic-Mezieres.
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