Former IDB manager Donald F. Terry shares excerpts from his recent Congressional testimony at a hearing on microfinance, and suggests that the time has come to take microfinance to a new level in order to reach the millions of people still living outside the formal economy in Latin America and the Caribbean.
I had the opportunity last month to speak at a hearing of the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee. Since I worked as a Congressional staffer earlier in my career, it was interesting being on the other side of the table.
Donald F. Terry, former manager of the IDB's Multilateral Investment Fund, explains why the saying "it's expensive to be poor" is the key to understanding the potential of investing in majority markets.
In my last blog post, I shared one of my favorite sayings about working with the base of the pyramid: “The poor don’t lack intelligence and initiative, what they lack is money and opportunity.” Here’s another one: “It’s expensive to be poor.” It sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s true, and it’s the key reason why entrepreneurial involvement in majority markets can be so successful.
As you learn about MajorityMarkets.org and Opportunities for the Majority, we thought it would be good to tell you a little about our history. We asked Donald F. Terry, founding manager of the IDB’s Multilateral Investment Fund, to explain how Opportunities for the Majority came to be.
I met with Ambassador Luis Alberto Moreno in the fall of 2005, just before he became president of the IDB. He told me he liked the work we were doing on microfinance and remittances at the MIF, and invited my ideas on taking the bank in other new directions. I told him I’d recently attended two conferences on social entrepreneurship organized by the World Resources Institute, and had been greatly impressed by the enthusiasm and insight of the attendees.
