Microfinance has come to play a crucial role in livelihood and production system of socio-economically weaker sections in the society. More specifically, microfinancing has the potential to mitigate the risk and adversity of the traditionally unbankabale sections of the society. In India, about 70% of the rural poor do not have a deposit account, 87% have no access to credit from formal sources, 85% of households do not have any kind of insurance and very few (less than 0.4%) have access to health insurance. 600 microfinance institutions (MFIs) have a cumulative outreach of 12.5 million poor households, representing 5% in the country. Globally, 500 million poor people demand financial services and the existing MFIs can serve only 16 million. The microfinance sector is growing at 30% per annum. In India MFIs are concentrated mostly in states such as Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Odisha and West Bengal. A process of consolidation in these states and expansion in other states are going on.
Many significant changes are being witnessed in the concept, vision and practice of microfinance world over. The vision of microfinance has changed from “provision of credit” to “permanent access to financial services” including insurance, money transfer, derivatives, financial investment, pensions, financial advice, guarantee certificate, refinance and foreign exchange. Globalisation is leading to the convergence of business and social objectives in microfinance sector and professional managers are getting exposed to tremendous challenges and opportunities. MFIs need to find a way to become cost competitive while maintaining product and service differentiation, and move up in the value chain from being an agency for credit to facilitating entrepreunrship. One of the key concerns that MFIs face is the availability of manpower with adequate knowledge, appropriate skill and right attitude. According to Basix, in next 5 to 10 years, 20,000 middle level managers and 150,000 loan officers will be required in the country to serve 50 million clients. Additionally, microfinance professionals are also required in commercial banks, insurance companies, agribusiness enterprises and execution of government funded development programs. It appears that the bottleneck for effective development of microfinance sector is the unavailability of human resource. There are just not enough academic and training institutions to produce adequate manpower for the sector.
There are a host of developmental and functional area management issues that need to be understood to successfully implement microfinance and related programmes. Curriculum of mainstream management schools is not equipped towards this end. Additionally, students from these schools do not possess right attitude to work with the poor at the grassroots level. The Microfinance Center of the HDF School of Management envisages to partially meet the huge manpower requirement of microfinance organizations by developing professional managers through its teaching and training programs. To guide the activities of the Microfinance Center, an Advisory Body consisting of experts from academic, development and microfinance background is in place.
The School organized a workshop to develop the curriculum for its postgraduate certificate program in microfinance. The workshop was steered by the Chairman of the Advisory Body of the Microfinance Centre of the School, Prof. Prabal K. Sen, Professor, XLRI, Jamshedpur and inaugural address was delivered by Shri Jagadananda, State Information Commissioner. Most of the microfinance institutions, banks, development financial institutions and civil society organizations in the state and prominent ones in the country participated in the workshop and lauded the initiative of the School with an assurance to support in student selection, program design and delivery, and placement. Prof. H. Panda, Director of the School, Dr. Dhanada K. Mishra Chairman, HDF, and Mr. Dhirendra K. Roy, ED, HDF also spoke.
