Learning about … Rural finance

By
22 June 2010

What exactly is microfinance and how does it work? How can you make a budget and why is it important to save? How can you set up a farmers’ cooperative, village bank or self-help group? The Rural Finance Learning Centre helps you to find answers to these questions.

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Illustration: Fred Geven

A lot of valuable training materials about rural finance are already out there, so instead of re-inventing the wheel, we bring together resources from around the world into one site,” explains Ake Olofsson, Rural Finance Officer at the FAO. Olofsson is also one of the editors of the Rural Finance Learning Centre (RFLC) website.

Going beyond simply offering publications, the RFLC gives people direct access to practical tools to learn and teach about finance issues. It includes downloadable modules to help trainers give short courses, as well as self-study and online interactive lessons on topics relating to microfinance, agricultural finance, savings and enterprise development.

Videos with examples from developing countries help bring the issues alive. Other tools include handouts and presentations, as well as ideas for group games to learn about accounting or setting up a business in a rural setting. According to Olofsson, “it is not easy to find good material and we rely on outside people, including subscribers to the site, to suggest resources. Where needed, we improve their format and fill in the gaps with new material.”

The site is a learning resource and can always benefit from more feedback and discussion, something that Olofsson welcomes. While the RFLC is set up to encourage the provision of better financial services it does

Rural Finance Learning Centre

The Rural Finance Learning Centre can be found at www.ruralfinance.org, or contacted via e-mail: rflc@fao.org. The RFLC is a joint initiative of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Bank and the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ).

give a balanced view, providing access to publications and lessons that look critically at the limits of microfinance in meeting the needs of the poorest, and other specific social concerns. The site is user friendly and most of its resources are free and easily downloadable. Many materials are available in English, Spanish and French.

For those with weaker Internet connections, most pages are also viewable in a low bandwidth format. However, some resources, such as the online lessons need a fast connection to work properly. Also, the videos can be viewed with one kind of media player only.

Some of these problems will be solved in the near future as the site is about to be updated. And for those without internet access “we have been thinking of making a CD-ROM available”, says Ake Olofsson.

Text: Mundie Salm