Mike Murray with GK client

In January 2007, CowFund Mike Murray had the opportunity to visit one of CowFund’s supported programs in India, Grameen Koota. Based on the Grameen model, it is now run separately to Grameen and Koota means ‘gathering’. The organisation is based on the outskirts of Bangalore and has about 44 branches throught the state of Karnataka.

Mike Murray writes:
‘I visited two of their branches, one in a rural area and one in an urban area. They were quite different in terms of the uses the loans were put to, obviously more livestock based in the rural area whereas the urban dwellers used the monies for sewing machines and other small business enterprises…

…There were five villages in total that received loans based on CowFund’s donation of A$20,000. Effectively these funds were deposited with a local bank as security against which a total of $A200,000 was advanced. This amount was able to furnish a total of 1,146 loans.
I had detailed discussions with the divisional manager and Suresh, the Chief Operating Officer, who impressed me with their professionalism. We went over their record keeping, application process etc. and it seemed that they were very solid and were benefiting from having moved from hard to soft record keeping where possible.
Similar to Grameen, the weekly meetings for loan disbursement and repayment take place in the local villages. The field officers work hard, starting meetings at 6.00 am in the morning to get them over by mid morning before the village goes to work. They then spend the afternoons and evenings doing administration before finishing around 9pm!

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