First Mifos X Customers Going Live! – Taking Elevate Africa to New Heights
2013 will be the year we transition the community over to the new Mifos X platform. We chose to start simple with individual lending support as the scope of our first application built top of the platform. Already this individual lending app is being used by several MFIs in production. Over the coming weeks we’re going to highlight some of our first beta-testers who have been using Mifos X. In this post, we’ll take a look at Elevate Africa, led by Henrik Esbensen – empowering entrepreneurs of West Africa through an in-depth individual lending model. Henrik ran into some...
Read MoreRecapping RHOK
Two days. Three continents. Twenty volunteers. One mission – 3 Billion Maries. Earlier this month, volunteers from HP and the broader geekspace came together to “hack for humanity” as part of the global Random Hacks of Kindness. With support from Social Coding 4 Good we united in various worldwide locations to take on three different challenges we had presented to strengthen the Mifos X platform. In Bangalore, Dublin, San Francisco, and via a remote bonus team in Chennai, we set out to build solutions to our three problem definitions along with volunteers from HP...
Read MoreHacking for a Cause – Mifos at Random Hacks of Kindness
I am totally psyched to be headed to San Francisco this weekend to experience Random Hacks of Kindness for the first time. We are ready to RHoK out with Mifos as one of the featured problems for December 2012. The sheer enormity of this global collaboration puts me in awe – i really don’t know what to expect but am excited to lead our project and am sure great things are on the way. We have been wanting to do RHoK for a while now and luckily all things have quickly come together thanks to Celine Takatsuno from Benetech and Social Coding 4 Good. We are privileged and grateful to...
Read MoreExcitement is in the Air – 2012 Mifos Summit Recap
This past month, we concluded our first-ever global gathering of the Mifos community at our 2012 Mifos Summit in Bangalore, India. It was a huge success with 42 people in attendance from a dozen countries including 11 Specialists, 20 microfinance practitioners, and 11 contributors and strategic partners. I was thrilled to meet community members new and old for the first time and to finally put faces to all the names/voices behind the Skype calls. I was proud to see all the interactions and camaraderie that was shared throughout the grounds of the venue in Bangalore. First off we want to...
Read MoreSpecialist Spotlight – Sol Develo
This regular blog series will shine the light on some of our top Specialists. Not only do we want to recognize them for their accomplishments, we want others to learn from the approach they’ve taken to promote and implement Mifos. Mifos Specialists are one of the most crucial links in our community – they are the driving force that is promoting and supporting Mifos worldwide. Aside from championing our product and bringing the Mifos technology to new markets, they act as the fundamental bridge feeding in MFI requirements to be developed by the community. Specialists don’t...
Read MoreRemixing Microfinance with the Client at the Center
From the onset, a fundamental part of our product vision for Mifos X has been to be a flexible platform agnostic of any one microfinance methodology. During the Mifos Summit (more takeaways to come in a future post), a key finding that emerged was the centrality of the relationship with the client in both the data model and the platform architecture. Regardless of whatever methodology supported, relationships can be defined between the client and whatever account, entity, or structure you would like. Gripped by a comment made by Rupal Patel on the importance of client data during our...
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