Foreign Affairs committee  It's an honour to be called to appear before this committee, especially as an American with only tangential connections to Canada. My name is Chris Dunford. I've been the president of Freedom from Hunger, based in Davis, California, just outside Sacramento, for the past 20 years

Foreign Affairs committee  Well, I can really speak only for the financial services area, where the private sector is already the dominant actor. In fact, the general sentiment in financial service circles, particularly microfinance in developing countries, is that the government should play a less active

Foreign Affairs committee  It's based both on need and opportunity. As I said, we train other local organizations on how to develop and adapt a service package that includes microfinance. There has to be a fairly active civil society in which there are local organizations that have sufficient management ca

Foreign Affairs committee  Local capacity, as I mentioned, is tremendously important. I'm not sure I could say that local ownership is as important as local capacity, in other words, ownership of a microfinance institution as a private sector institution. Often they are commercial entities that are shareho

Foreign Affairs committee  To the first question, Freedom from Hunger does not itself have investors; as I said, we're a classical charity. However, we did spin off or help create a sister organization called MicroCredit Enterprises, which is one of these microfinance investment vehicles—to make a clear di

Foreign Affairs committee  Excellent.

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, there is definitely a correlation, in the sense that when you see women join one of these groups, initially the typical member is very shy and reluctant to speak up in the group meetings, especially if there is a foreigner in attendance. It's quite remarkable that a few meet

Foreign Affairs committee  Yes, they are, but to answer your question of whether there are enough, there's not a good classification of microfinance programs that distinguishes how effective they are at helping women take advantage of the microfinance opportunities. Generally, the programs that are most su

Foreign Affairs committee  There's certainly a big opportunity, to the extent that there's an active cooperative movement in a country. Francophone West Africa has a very active financial cooperative movement, which is why our partner of choice in francophone West Africa is the credit unions or the savings

Foreign Affairs committee  It is, so in essence we're just providing more structure and discipline to a model that they already follow as part of their culture.

Foreign Affairs committee  Right, but there really is a difference in the kind of cooperative I'm talking about, which is, as I said, a pre-cooperative. It's small enough for the women to really know what each other is doing, both outside the meetings and during the meetings, so they really can engage in c

Foreign Affairs committee  Generally, the most successful examples, as I alluded to, are the financial cooperatives in West Africa and some other countries. When it comes to reaching out into rural areas and to poorer communities, the financial cooperatives have been more successful than have the agricultu

Foreign Affairs committee  I'm not a student of cooperatives per se, so I don't know that I can give you the texture of what works and what doesn't work in agricultural cooperatives.

Foreign Affairs committee  That's correct.

Foreign Affairs committee  I alluded to the reason that I think is most commonly cited. I'm not sure how much hard evidence there is, but generally it's the size. When it gets over a certain size, then the ability of all the members to really participate in governance is diluted, and that opens up the oppo