In the economic crisis linked to Covid-19, the occurrence of a liquidity and / or solvency crisis turns out to be one of the main risks microfinance institutions are facing. To deal with this, the Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation, the Microfinance African Institutions Network (MAIN), International Solidarity for Development and Investment (SIDI) and the ACTES Foundation are creating a consortium to better support the organizations supported in Africa.
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In April 2020, MAIN sent a questionnaire to all its members in order to gather their needs and find out what type of support the network could offer them. The results of this survey show that most of the institutions questioned encounter difficulties in managing their liquidity and wonder how to continue to serve their customers in a sustainable manner in such a context.
It is in this context that the Consortium was formed, which brings together the Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation, MAIN, SIDI and the ACTES Foundation. The objective of the Consortium is to provide the organizations supported with risk analysis and management tools in order to anticipate and better manage the impact of the crisis on their liquidity and solvency.
The Consortium will thus offer 50 microfinance institutions, including 31 partners from the Grameen Crédit Agricole Foundation, mainly in West and East Africa, support on the theme of liquidity and solvency risks management. The target organizations are mainly small institutions (Tiers 3: loan portfolio <10 million dollars), very present in rural areas.
The support will take the form of a cycle of three online training courses for each institution, workshops and personalized coaching, which will be provided by Cabinet Senbumo. In addition to liquidity and solvency management, institutions will be trained on the subject of resumption of activities following the Covid-19 crisis. The programme will start on July 06, 2020 and will last for 6 weeks.