Donate to the Year of Microcredit!

United Nations Capital Development Fund

in collaboration with

Financial Women's Association
Women Advancing Microfinance
Women's Association of Venture and Equity
85 Broads
and
Women's Bond Club of New York

is pleased to invite you to a breakfast panel in celebration of the

International Year of Microcredit 2005

Friday, June 10, 2005
7:45 until 10:00 in the morning

Delegates Dining Room, 4th Floor, United Nations Headquarters
Visitors' Entrance at 46th Street and First Avenue

$100 per ticket
(Please bring a printout of your email confirmation for security purposes)

Panel Discussion will focus on "Wall Street and Microfinance;
applying sophisticated finance to this emerging industry"

Special guests and panelists will include:

Ms. Nane Annan, Wife of Secretary-General Kofi Annan (invited)
Mr. Tom Easton, New York Bureau Chief, The Economist
Ms. Fatimata Lonfo, Global Microentrepreneur Award Winner
Mr. Jack Lowe, CEO, BlueOrchard Finance s.a.
Ms. Maria Otero, CEO, ACCION International
Mr. David Satterthwaite, CEO, Prisma MicroFinance, Inc.

Beatriz Armendariz de Aghion, Lecturer in Economics at Harvard University, and Jonathan Morduch, Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics at New York University will be signing copies of their new book, "The Economics of Microfinance."

Proceeds will benefit the Global Mircoentrepreneurship Awards Program
and the Microentrepreneur Marketplace

Online Registration is available at http://women-wave.org/
Registration closes at 4 pm on June 9
For questions dial: +1-212-906-6308

For security reasons, only confirmed invitees will have access to the building. Please bring photo identification with you.
Business Attire or National Dress Recommended

The United Nations wishes to acknowledge WAVE for its support with the payment process.

Microcredit summary
Microcredit has been changing the lives of people and revitalizing communities since the beginning of trade. Currently, microentrepreneurs use loans as small as $100 to grow thriving businesses, and in turn, provide for their families, leading to strong and flourishing local communities. The Year of Microcredit 2005 calls for building inclusive financials sectors and strengthening the powerful, but often untapped, entrepreneurial spirit existing in communities around the world.

Speaker Biographies:

Fatimata Lonfo, Owner, Windyla's Boutique and Hairbraiding Salon; Global Microentrepreneur Award Winner
Fatimata Lonfo fled her native Cote d'Ivoire, a West African country now mired in civil war, in October 2001. An airline executive in her old country, the newly arrived refugee scrubbed toilets, worked under-the-table retail jobs and braided hair for nearly a year before taking a leap of faith and starting her own business.

"My friends said, 'You crazy,'" she said as she perched over a young girl's half-braided head of hair in the back room of her colorful, unheated African clothing store. " 'You know here is not like Africa. You cannot open a business if you don't have documents, who is going to give you the things to open?' And I said, me, you don't know me. When I want to do something, I will do it."

Now the proud owner of Windyla's Boutique and Hair Braiding Salon in Staten Island, Ms. Lonfo credits her success to God, to perseverance, and to ACCION New York, the non-profit microfinance organization that gave her first small business loan after many banks had refused. A creative risk-taker with a flair for unique designs, Ms. Lonfo gets the word out about her business by putting on fashion shows to showcase her new lines. Her business supports her and her three children, the oldest of whom started studying immigration law in community college this fall.

Asked for her reaction to winning the grand prize at the Global Microentrepreneurship Awards in October 2004, Ms. Lonfo replied with a smile, "That makes me feel like an important person now. An important person in America."

Jack Lowe is the Chief Executive Officer of BlueOrchard.
BlueOrchard Finance s.a. is a microfinance investment consultancy. Our mission is to promote private investments in projects and enterprises contributing to the sustainable development of micro-entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Our action is grounded in the philosophy that development must be beneficial to all its stakeholders in order to be sustainable.

We firmly believe that social and financial returns can be simultaneously obtained through microfinance investments and that this makes microfinance both a powerful tool for economic development and a very attractive new asset class worth considering in a diversified investment portfolio strategy.

BlueOrchard is the adviser of the Dexia Micro-Credit Fund, which is the first private worldwide and fully commercial microfinance investment fund. It currently services about fourty microfinance institutions in twenty different emerging economies. BlueOrchard also advises the responsAbility Global Microfinance Fund since December 2003.

BlueOrchard has also issued two tranches of CDO's in the US to support long-term loans to larger MFI's. Its total assets under management are roughly 150 million dollars.

Jack Lowe's long entrepreneurial career took him to eight different countries and into a range of businesses. His career began in the Far East, where he opened with Japanese colleagues the McKinsey & Co. office in Tokyo. After coming to Switzerland in 1974, he started several franchising businesses, and in 1986, upon the sale of these businesses, became a partner of Montgomery Securities and crafted their international business activities, including venture and private equity funds outside the U.S. Upon the sale of Montgomery to Bank of America in 1997, he acquired several medium-sized businesses he now controls, some of which are outside Europe in emerging markets.

Jack Lowe holds an MBA in Finance from Stanford University

María Otero, President & CEO of ACCION International
María Otero is president & CEO of ACCION International. ACCION is a leading global microfinance institution that seeks to open the financial systems in developing countries to reach the poor. ACCION provides technical assistance, equity investment and financial services to 27 of the most advanced microfinance institutions in the world, which ACCION helped start and/or grow. Most of these microfinance institutions are regulated, are members of the ACCION Network, and together reach 1.5 million borrowers with a portfolio of over $860 million. Ms. Otero first joined ACCION in 1986 as director of its lending program in Honduras, where she lived for three years. She became president of the organization in 2000.

Ms. Otero is a leading voice on sustainable microfinance, and has published extensively on the subject, including as co-editor of The New World of Microfinance, published by Kumarian Press. Ms. Otero chairs the board of ACCION Investments, a US$20 million investment company for microfinance. She also serves on the boards of directors of three regulated microfinance institutions in Latin America: Mibanco /Peru, BancoSol/Bolivia and Compartamos/Mexico, and one in Africa. Ms. Otero also serves as the chair of the MicroFinance Network, a global association of 30 leading microfinance institutions, and is coordinator of the Council of Microfinance Equity Funds, which convenes 18 equity investment funds dedicated to microfinance. Ms. Otero serves on several other boards, including that of the Calvert Foundation and the United States Institute of Peace. She was chair of the board of Bread for the World from 1992-1997. In 1994, President Clinton appointed Ms. Otero to serve as chair of the Board of Directors of the Inter-American Foundation, a position she held until January 2000. Since 1997, Ms. Otero has been an adjunct professor at the John Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS). In 2000, she received Hispanic Magazine's "Latina Excellence Award," and was also featured in Latina magazine. Maria Otero has an MA in Literature from the University of Maryland and an MA in International/Relations with a focus on economic development from Johns Hopkins SAIS. She was born and raised in La Paz, Bolivia, and resides in Washington, DC with her husband and three children.

Jonathan Morduch
Jonathan Morduch is Associate Professor of Public Policy and Economics at New York University. He is also Chair of the United Nations Steering Committee on Poverty Measurement. Prior to joining NYU, he taught on the Economics faculty at Harvard University, was a National Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and was a MacArthur Foundation Research Fellow at Princeton University. In 2002-3 was an Abe Fellow at the University of Tokyo. His research on risk, financial markets, and poverty and inequality has been published in the Review of Economic Studies, Economic Journal, Journal of Econometrics, Journal of Development Economics, and Journal of Public Economics. A new book on The Economics of Microfinance (co-authored with Beatriz Armendariz de Aghion) will be published by the MIT Press in May 2005. His current research is on the political economy of foreign aid and the economic foundations of social investment. He is also presently involved in analyses of rural finance in Indonesia and of the behavior of SafeSave clients in urban Bangladesh.

Endorsements - The Economics of Microfinance

"The microfinance movement is bringing hope, prosperity, and progress to many of the poorest people in the world. It is necessary to use critical economic reasoning to understand why the movement is such a success and how its exact achievements can be assessed and scrutinized. This book is a splendid contribution to that goal, and will be a great help to students, teachers, and practitioners in economics and the social sciences."
--Amartya Sen, Lamont University Professor, Harvard University, Nobel Laureate in Economics (1998)

"A great place to learn how and why microfinance really works, and where it hits its limits. The book, written by two leading young economists, brims with new evidence and provides fresh perspectives on old debates. Clearly written and sharply argued, it revisits and transforms important ideas about poverty reduction, finance, and incentives. The authors describe what we know and what we need to know in order to move forward."
--Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor of Economics and Finance, Columbia University, Nobel Laureate in Economics (2001)

"Microfinance is playing a key role in the economies of many developing countries, providing small-scale entrepreneurs with the access to financing that is so often unavailable from commercial and state banks. This book provides an accessible, analytical roadmap for understanding this important trend. The authors tackle central debates and provide new evidence, giving readers tools to create future innovations."
--George Soros, Founder and Chairman, Open Society Institute

"The promotion of microfinance is one of the most significant innovations in development policy of the past twenty-five years. This timely book provides a guide to its main ideas and reviews the evidence in a way that is both accessible and rigorous. It will be a valuable resource for students, researchers, and practitioners."
--Timothy Besley, Professor of Economics and Political Science, London School of Economics and Political Science

"This is an important book by two of the leading economists in microfinance, detailing what we know and don't know about the subject. It is an accessible book laden with examples, but it doesn't sacrifice intellectual rigor. It should be of great interest to students, researchers, and practitioners with an analytical bent."
--Raghuram G. Rajan, University of Chicago and the International Monetary Fund

David Satterthwaite, MicroCapital
'MicroCapital' is commercial investment in microfinance, advocating for it to become a certified asset class. Currently, microfinance is a long way from an asset class: the investment landscape is dominated by governmental and charitable aid funding. The mission of MicroCapital is to provide business people with candid, bottom-line information on microfinance investment.

David Satterthwaite leads MicroCapital. He has been recognized with awards from Fast Company, Hewlett Packard, the National Social Venture Competition, and the Puget Sound Business Journal as well as mentioned in Financial Times, Reuters, and The Wall Street Journal.

David is President & CEO of Prisma MicroFinance, Inc. Prisma is a for-profit retail micro-lender that makes micro-loans in Honduras and Nicaragua since 2001. Prisma is a U.S. Holding Company operating wholly owned subsidiaries in Central America. From 1995-2000 David lived in Nicaragua where he founded a credit union, which was the predecessor to Prisma.

David has sat on the boards of several "for-profit social enterprises" including Access Technology Learning Center, a technology and training company increasing workplace productivity of the blind, First Immigrants Funding, a mortgage company focused on immigrant borrowers, Fonkoze, a Haitian micro-lender, and Bridges to Business, a training and job placement agency for at-risk youth. Additionally, he consults both for-profit and non-profit firms on corporate strategy and fund-raising.

David graduated with honors from Haverford College with degrees in philosophy and feminism. He periodically teaches a class on "globalization" at Boston College where he is pursuing his decorate thesis entitled "Private Property for All".