Bulletin Board.........

CGAP PROJECT FUNDING ANNOUNCEMENT

The Consultative Group to Assist the Poorest (CGAP), launched in 1995, is a multi-donor initiative to further the development of micro-finance services for poor customers. 25 member donors have come together to coordinate activities and define common policies and procedures for microfinance activities.

CGAP core funds will be made available primarily to private institutions, including retail institutions, which provide financial services directly to their individual clients, as well as wholesale institutions, which work with a number of retail institutions.

A retail institution will ordinarily be a candidate for CGAP core funding only if:

• the majority of its clientele are poor, including especially the very poor and poor women (minimum 50 percent of the current clients should be poor women);
• it has already achieved significant scale (> 3000 current poor and very poor customers);
• it has already achieved operational self-sufficiency, and is moving on a path to full financial self-sufficiency; and
• it is on a clear path towards an ability to mobilize domestic commercial resources (e.g., deposits or bank loans) in amounts which considerably exceed the institution's concessional funding

• Institutions which consider themselves eligible in the light of the above guidelines are invited to submit a brief application, using a prescribed format, to the CGAP Secretariat, at the address below.Funding possibilities will not be screened by a formal tender process. Applications may be submitted at any time, to coincide with two response cycles. Responses will be made within two months in these two cycles to all applications received up to that date: June 30 and November 30, 1997. In the response, the secretariat will advise the applicant whether or not it wishes to pursue a detailed review of the applicant's proposal.

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  For further details, contact:

  APPLICATION
  CGAP Secretariat
  The World Bank
  1818 H Street, NW
  Washington, D.C. 20433
  FAX: (202) 522-3744