Through the Net Impact Club, you can participate in the diverse activities that the Duke Microfinance Leadership Initiative (DMLI) is doing to learn, get involved and make a change. DMLI is a newly formed student organization that is helping to raise awareness and connect students, faculty and staff to resources and opportunities around the growing field of microfinance. We are using a “living laboratory” approach that emphasizes student leadership and connection with professionals in microfinance. Please click here to learn more about the DMLI.

Our goals and objectives are to:

• Stimulate discourse about microfinance through our network of students, faculty, alumni, and the microfinance community beyond Duke’s borders.

• Raise awareness about microfinance and its potential for helping in poverty alleviation and economic development.

• Provide opportunities for Duke students to experience microfinance first-hand through research, internships, conferences, and career development.

What Is Microfinance?

Just imagine how would things be without savings, loans, insurance, and other financial related services that allow us to have a better life? Unfortunately, more than half of the planet lives under $2 dollars per day and with few chances to have these products and services that have been  the base of development to first world nations.

What Microfinance is doing, is developing those services to serve that big portion of the market that no one had included before with products suitable to their needs.

Microfinance refers to the provision of financial services to poor or low-income clients, including consumers and the self-employed. The term also refers to the practice of sustainably delivering those services. More broadly, it refers to a movement that envisions “a world in which as many poor and near-poor households as possible have permanent access to an appropriate range of high quality financial services, including not just credit but also savings insurance and fund transfers.

Source: Wikipedia

To learn more please visit the DMLI website.

Upcoming Events

Previous Events

• Bi-weekly events throughout the semester. These events will provide regular engagement of DMLI members and other students, so as to maintain interest and activity in between larger events. Event ideas include "Microfinance Movies" and "Conversations from the Field."

• Development of Microfinance Fund: One of our primary long-term goals is to develop a microfinance fund that would function in a way similar to student investment funds, offering the opportunity for DMLI members to invest in microfinance organizations and monitor how their funds are used. A unique advantage of the DMLI is that we can combine the work of the fund with internship opportunities, enabling students to visit communities where funds are dispersed to determine the net impact of investments both in terms of financial and social impact.

• Peer-to-peer Mentoring: The mentorship program will utilize our mixture of undergraduate/graduate and experienced/novice students to build capacities at the beginning, intermediate and advanced levels of knowledge on microfinance.

• Curriculum and Academics: In addition to courses that we are helping to shape with several departments within Duke, we are compiling a database of graduate students doing their dissertation/master’s projects on microfinance, and building an online bibliography and resource center via our Blackboard site.

• Events: We are committed to doing events of all kinds: panels, conferences, fairs, exhibits, and more. Some of the things we have done

• In January 2007 and 2008, MLI’s we organized Microfinance Career Panels for graduate students at the Sanford Institute and Fuqua Students in which we met with leaders at FINCA International, Grameen Foundation, ACCION, and other institutions. 
• In the spring of 2007 and spring of 2008, we organized a panel of microfinance speakers for Duke’s Footprints conference with speakers like the Bishop John of Rwanda and Beth Rhyne, Senior Vice President of Research and Policy of ACCION.
• This fall, we collaborated with CASE and Fuqua’s Social Impact Club to bring John Hatch—the Founder of FINCA International and one of the pioneers of microfinance.
• In November, we organized the First Annual Holiday Trunk Show that featured local businesses supporting Fair Trade and microfinance-funded producers across the world.
• A Rotating Microfinance Photo Exhibit called, “Beyond Banking: The Faces of Microfinance.”