Cost: $10 includes light breakfast.

Register: https://datainthefield.eventbrite.com.au

Speaker: Tatiana Peralta – Opportunity International Australia

Facilitator: Leigh Coleman – Founder and former CEO of Many Rivers Microfinance

Places are limited, so be sure to register today!

About this learning event

Opportunity International Australia partners with a number of overseas microfinance institutions, with a focus in India, Philippines and Indonesia. Opportunity supports its partners by funding their microfinance operations but also by building the organisations’ capacity to deliver best quality microfinance services. For the past 5 years, Opportunity has been working with its partners in understanding their social performance, in order to be able to improve their practices, and maximise the impact in client lives. They are currently piloting the use of tablets for social data collection with one of their partners in India, Samhita, Tatiana Peralta has just returned from seeing the implementation of this program in action and will talk us through getting everyone in the organisation, from CEO to staff on the ground, excited about the data potential.

What’s unique to the Opportunity International strategy is a dashboard of client level indicators. The data they collect via their tablets includes:

• Client profile – household members, no. of children, education, etc.
• Poverty levels
• Amount borrowed
• Access to healthcare, water, sanitation and education

This information, when used consistently, can help understand and improve social as well as financial performance of microfinance institutions. It also enables Opportunity International to make more impactful investment decisions.

This is a story of an organisation in India moving from paper-based record-keeping and data collection to a highly digitised system. While these experiences occurred a world away, there will be so much that we recognise of ourselves in them.

The event will be facilitated by Leigh Coleman, Australian microfinance pioneer.

About our speaker

Tatiana Peralta is a Program Manager at Opportunity International Australia. She has worked in the design and implementation of Opportunity’s social performance strategy, today managing the implementation of such strategy across India, South East Asia and Latin America. Tatiana is an accredited SROI practitioner, MBA graduate and in her previous life, an investment banker. She has worked in the impact investment arena for over 5 years now. She has a passion for effective and impactful investments, and thus in bringing the measurement conversation into the investor’s table.  She has engaged with a variety of stakeholders in such conversations, driving both organisational and industry wide change.

About our facilitator

Leigh Coleman was the founding staff member and CEO of Many Rivers Microfinance. Drawing on proven development principles from overseas they more or less started with a blank piece of paper in Northern NSW working exclusively with Aboriginal people. Many Rivers now operates in 14 regions across three states and has achieved the following outcomes. Supported 728 people to start and develop enterprises most of which are Indigenous people; lent more than $3.5 million in micro finance; maintaining a 90% repayment rate on average across the whole period; realised a 68% businesses sustainability rate which is on parity with business start-up and failure rates in Australia generally; seen over 1,000 new jobs created most of which are in Regional and Remote communities. Many Rivers has worked closely with Mission Australia and Westpac who are represented on the Many Rivers Board. They also work closely with Accenture and Deloitte Access Economics. Many Rivers has been primarily funded by multiyear service delivery contacts with numerous major corporations, buying results and outcomes that strengthen the local community and economy and add value to the corporation’s business model and balance sheet. Leigh’s role included initiating developing these relationships as well as similar relationships with Traditional Owner groups.