Unitus-ACCION Alliance for India

This had been in planning for a while and was finally announce publically today. This is very exciting. ACCION is such an outstanding organization. Look at what the joint goal is:

Providing access to microfinance services to 15 million of India’s working poor by 2015

What will be ACCION's role?

ACCION will assist commercial entities such as banks and finance companies in extending microfinance products and services and providing technical assistance and training.

What will be Unitus' role?

Unitus will identify high-potential NGO microfinance institutions and speed their growth through grants, capacity-building consulting, and capital investments.

The alliance will provide a permanent and sustainable approach for the continuous development of microfinance services throughout the country. It really is a unique alliance of two very progressive and effective organizations.

Here is the letter I received today:


Dear Tim,

We are extremely excited to announce today the Unitus-ACCION Alliance for India. Through this partnership, Unitus and ACCION International have established a joint goal of providing access to microfinance services to 15 million of India’s working poor by 2015.

You may already be familiar with ACCION International, a leading microfinance organization with more than 35 years of industry leadership. If not, we invite you to learn about ACCION (and subscribe to their e-newsletter) on their Web site:

www.accion.org

As far as we know, this alliance is the first time two microfinance organizations have partnered in a large-scale, on-the-ground relationship covering all aspects of microfinance—a relationship that will move the microfinance industry forward not just in a few villages, but across the entire nation of India.

This partnership taps the strengths of both ACCION and Unitus by bringing the commercial world to microfinance (ACCION’s role), and transforming NGOs so that they can operate in the commercial world (Unitus’s role).

To learn more about this partnership, please visit the Unitus Web site:

www.unitus.com

As always, we appreciate your support.

- The Unitus Team

Here is the Press Release.