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In May of this year the first local manager had taken on responsibility for the MFI Hofokam which had been established through a merger of village banking programs in three neighbouring dioceses in the rural West of Uganda in 2003. First priority was now to reach operational self-sufficiency. A tailor made simple model containing the key influencing parameters for all income and cost items seems to be adequate in order to answer the question which screws need to be turned to increase financial performance. Almost all loans then disbursed were loans to groups of about 15 to 25 people called village banks. Therefore modelling e.g. the costs per loan arising from the visits to
the group per month could mainly be based on the average distance travelled per visit in each region. The future
income was modelled by transforming the flat
interest rates paying on a non decreasing balance into effective rates
which can be applied to the estimated outstanding
loan volume. The loan officer’s supervisors had already started assisting their
team
Motorbikes for client visits: key
assets of the company - loan officers often travel more than 1.300 km per
month
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members to adjust the client visiting schedule from a weekly cycle to a bi-weekly one. Loan officers had figured out that clients were too busy with their households and businesses for meeting on a weekly basis. Gaining double capacity in this way for each loan officer now detailed monthly schedules were mapped out asking the loan officers to mobilize and train new groups in their respective areas of service.
Two loan supervisors in front of Fort Portal Branch and
headquarters. Each of them takes care of about 8 - 10 loan officers.
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In
the beginning supervisors only estimated
distances travelled to the village banks by their team members. But from
now on everybody agreed that this must be measured with much more diligence
since fuel and maintenance for the motorbikes are very expensive.
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The general manager liked the “torch” in form of the model which allowed shedding light on the origin of each cost item being constructed now out of changeable parameters measuring costs per unit in the respective categories.
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