Here’s an interview with Casey Wilson, the Co-Founder of Wokai.org in China:

I received this email from Wokai yesterday:

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A wokai tshirt for earning “impact points”. SMART. When I get my shirt in the mail, Wokai will have just turned me into a walking billboard.

Would I wear a shirt from just any brand that offered me one? No. But, it just so happens that Wokai, Kiva, Grameen, and Vittana are all microfinance brands that I’m passionate about. And, if I had a shirt from each of them, I’d happily wear them and spread their message to more people as a walking mini billboard. Do you have a nonprofit with passionate supporters? Whether they be family members or best friends, I’m sure you have at least a few. Turn them into walking mobile billboards.

Now, I have no idea how many people are getting these same shirts. But that’s not the point. The fact that the reward feels “special” is all that matters to me (and others) who received this offer. Now, that could change if I see hundreds of other people around the Seattle area wearing Wokai shirts — but until that happens, this is a brilliant fundraising & marketing initiative

Well done, Wokai.

I was just taking a look at Wokai as a result of a post on Facebook (linking to this post about moving Wokai to the cloud) — and noticed a feature I absolutely LOVE when I signed in. Contribution Plans!

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The feature allows a registered member of Wokai to set up a recurring contribution (to entrepreneurs in China) and/or donation (to Wokai overhead) that will be billed either monthly or quarterly to a credit card. For instance, I just set up a donation of $25 every three months with a $10 donation to Wokai. It’s not much, but every little bit counts. I’ve long been a supporter of the organization and would have donated more often had this feature been in existence since the beginning. But now, I can no longer use the excuse that “I forgot” when it comes to donating — but unfortunately I’ll have to use that one for my lack of donations over the past couple years

This is an unbelievably smart feature on Wokai’s part, and one that not even Kiva has implemented yet (if I’m wrong on that, let me know). It’s a fact that donors around the globe are being bombarded from all angles with pitches to help NGO A, NGO B, and NGO C — but now, if Wokai can win their attention once (no small task), they have the ability to sign up recurring donors rather than relying on email marketing to bring donors back to make additional transactions. I have no idea the actual numbers, but I’m betting a recurring donor is at least 10x as valuable to Wokai (since you have to factor in donor acquisition costs) than a one time donor.

To access and set up a Wokai contribution plan for yourself, just login and click the “Contribution Plan” option within your “My Wokai“.

I’m willing to bet that more peer to peer lending platforms, and other non profits for that matter, will start implementing this feature in the near future.

Happy [continual] contributing!!

This was posted on the Wokai Blog earlier this week.

The Global Policy Institute at the London Metropolitan University has recently published the first of a series of reports on microfinance in China. In this paper they offer their view of what is preventing microcredit from developing in China and offer recommendations for Chinese policy makers that wish to promote this sector.

According to their analysis, the slow growth of microcredit in China is attributed to a set up regulations that need to be amended, lack of access to domestic and international capital markets as source of funding, and tight economic viability of microcredit companies. The conclusion is that while some non profit NGOs operating in China are laudable, true impact on the millions of people at the bottom of the pyramid can only happen with the implementation of a double-bottom-line approach of helping the poor as well as establishing financially viable lending entities.

The proposal is to create a newer, more flexible organization regulated by an independent body that will allow customer deposits, will not have strict minimum capital requirements, is tax-exempt, and can accept investment domestically and internationally.

The report introduces key relevant facts in Part 1, highlights current problems in Part 2, and offers policy recommendations in Part 3. Conclusions are the results of field visits to Association of Rural Development of Yilong County (ARDY- Wokai’s Sichuan Field Partner) as well as meetings with organizations like UNDP, PlanetFinance, Chinese Academy of Social Science and Grameen.

This 20 page report is well written and definitely worth a read. Download here.

For those of you who will be in China in early August (or wanting to do a bit of traveling), check out Frexh Shanghai 2010 — a two day art/food/fashion/music event in Shanghai August 6th and 7th! Part of the proceeds will benefit Wokai, which as most of you likely know, is China’s first microfinance lending platform.

Here’s a video the Frexh team put together highlighting Wokai. I don’t have a ton of experience with video, but I do know making high quality videos is not easy and I’m impressed with the quality of this one by the Frexh team.

You can get further info about the event here.

[via Jenny Gao at the Wokai blog]

Congrats to Casey Wilson and the Wokai team for landing an appearance on Morning Call Bloomberg this past week!! Here’s the video:

Casey Wilson recently had a great email that she sent out about the recent articles about Kiva in the NY times that I thought was worth posting:

You might have read Stephanie Strom’s article “Confusion Where Money Lent via Kiva Goes” in the New York Times a few days ago.  This issue has been making the rounds since David Roodman’s post a month ago.  As a fellow “peer-to-peer” microfinance organization, we thought it was important for us to follow up with our own supporters on this issue.

To be clear, contributions on Wokai go to microfinance institutions (our “Field Partners”) in rural China, who are in charge of distributing the loans to the borrowers and collecting repayment.  A borrower can in fact receive a loan from a Field Partner prior the time the loan is “100% funded” on the Wokai website.  Below are two excerpts from Wokai’s FAQ that might shed more light on the issue.

Can a recipient’s loan start before it is 100% funded?

Yes. Once a Field Partner has posted a recipient’s profile online, Wokai Field Partners can use their own capital to issue that recipient’s loan. Wokai then reimburses this capital to the Field Partner once the recipient’s loan has been 100% funded. If the recipient’s loan is canceled for any reason, the recipient will no longer be designated as a “Wokai recipient” and that Field Partner will permanently fund the loan with its own capital reserves.

What happens if a recipient’s loan does not get 100% funded by the final fundraising day?

If a recipient’s loan is not 100% funded by the time it reaches zero “Days Left”, then Wokai will either extend the recipient’s fundraising period by one month or, if there is any specific reason why contributors are choosing not to fund the recipient, Wokai will cancel the recipient and allow contributors to select a new recipient to support.

Wokai is committed to being transparent in its processes.  To that end, we discuss our field partner relationships right on our “About” pages.  We even received credit from David Roodman in his original post for being very open about our relationships with field partners.

To read more about what Wokai does, visit their site at Wokai.org

[via WokaiSeattle on Twitter]

SeaMo is pleased to announce January’s Microfinance and Microbrews at The Pike Brewery (1415 1st Ave, Seattle) on Thursday, January 15th beginning at 5:30pm. This month we are featuring Casey Wilson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Wokai, a new peer-to-peer microfinance lending platform focused on the Chinese market. Casey will be talking about the nuances of microfinance in China.

Microfinance and Microbrews is a once-every-other-month gathering to learn more about microfinance and to meet others who are interested too. There is a $5 suggested donation at the door to help cover the cost of appetizers.

With the spotlight on China with the 2008 Olympics Games, I naturally started to look at how China is doing in the microfinance sector.   However, to my surprise, there was actually very little information about microfinance in China.  I scoured the internet for hours, and could only find a handful of sites that had anything relevant.  So, I thought I would highlight some of my findings:

I was expecting there to be a lot more, but I was only able to find the following MFIs in China:

• ARDPAS – Association for Rural Development of Poor Areas in Sichuan
• CFPA – China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation
• CZWSDA – Chifeng Zhaowuda Women’s Sustainable Development Association
• OI China – Opportunity International China
• PATRA Hunchun
• PATRA Yanbian

Most of the articles I found were fairly old, so I here is a list of some of the more recent articles:

• Microfinance in China: Micro vs. Mandarin
• History of Microcredit in China
• Social entrepreneurship in Sichuan: Interview with Meg Young of Ecologia, a sustainable development program
• China Life Insurance Company Limited Introduces Microinsurance Products in Nine Provinces
• Sustainable Development in China
• What Microfinance Means for China’s Growth
• Microfinance Institutions To Debut In China’s Zhejiang Province

-Wokai
Wokai is a “capital-contributing microfinance intermediary in the China microfinance field.” They have good information on the site, and they have a great blog that talks a lot about microfinance in China.  Definitely a great place to start if you are looking for info about China.
-Mix Market
“The MIX MARKET â„¢ provides information to sector actors and the public at large on microfinance institutions (MFIs) worldwide, public and private funds that invest in microfinance, MFI networks, raters/external evaluators, advisory firms, and governmental and regulatory agencies.”  The Mix Market is very useful if you want to dig deeper into specific organizations and countries.
-China Asociation of Microfinance (CAM)
Although the website is a little hard to navigate, CAM has a lot of current events and news feeds about microfinance associations in China.

Like I said earlier, I wasn’t able to find very much information pertaining to microfinance in China.  If anybody has any other good websites with relevant information, please let me know.