Finance for Resilience: Building climate resilience through microfinance
Finance for Resilience: Building climate resilience through microfinance
The first episode of CDKN's Finance for resilience podcast series unpacks the role of microfinance as a financial instrument to build resilience in communities that are vulnerable to climate change.
The discussion explores the concept and impact of microfinancing as well as the very real possibilities that microfinancing affords in the betterment of the social well-being of some of the most vulnerable communities to climate change.
CDKN's climate finance lead, Kamleshan Pillay, is joined by distinguished guests Tineyi Mawocha - CEO of Opportunity Bank Uganda, Lydia Baffour Awuah - Senior Programme Manager at Opportunity International and Puneet Chopra - partner at Microsave Consulting in India.
Listen to Episode 1: Building climate resilience through microfinance below or on Spotify, Google or Apple iTunes. Read the transcript here.
Further reading
- An overview of the microfinance industry in Kenya
- Kenya microfinance needs to be regulated, says CEO of KBA
- fsd Kenya website
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Lydia Baffour Awuah, Senior Programme Manager at Opportunity International UK, leads Opportunity UK’s Gender and Roots of Change Women Economic Empowerment programme, which focuses on providing gender smart rural and agricultural finance solutions to rural women to sustain their livelihood. She has over 20 years of experience in microfinance, working and supporting financial institutions across Africa to address the challenges and opportunities related to financial inclusion, women, inclusive agricultural transformation and SME lending for development. Prior to Opportunity, Lydia worked as the Research, Impact and Development Manager at Sinapi Aba Trust in Ghana focusing on identifying and addressing gender-based constraints to women economic inclusion, impact measurement and dissemination of learnings to improve programme outcomes.
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Puneet Chopra is a Partner at MSC, MicroSave Consulting. He heads the Banking, Agriculture Consulting and Climate Change Domains at MSC. He is an expert in policy and regulations; digital innovations and transformation; strategy, business planning, processes and operations; consumer research and human-centric design; product development and marketing; distribution channels; IEC, training and capacity building; project and programme management; and monitoring, learnings and evaluation (MLE).
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Sam Bickersteth is Chief Executive of Opportunity International delivering financial inclusion and enterprise solutions to vulnerable and disadvantaged communities in Africa. He led CDKN from 2011 to 2017 and with the team established the global programme of support to developing country decision-makers deliver innovative solutions for climate compatible development.
