Unitus

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Unitus is a global microfinance accelerator that acts as a social venture capital investor for the microfinance industry. Unitus identifies the highest-potential microfinance institutions (MFIs) in developing countries and helps accelerate their growth through capital investments and capacity-building consulting, thus empowering them to help exponentially more poor people worldwide. In doing so, Unitus aims to demonstrate that MFIs can be run as profitable, large-scale, poverty-focused businesses with links to formal capital markets. As of April 2006, Unitus had eight MFI partners worldwide serving more than 635,000 poor clients. Based in Redmond, Washington, USA, and with an office in Bangalore, India, Unitus is a non-profit that relies on innovative financial instruments, and the financial resources of like-minded individuals and foundations, to fulfill its mission. Unitus received the 2006 Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist Award for taking an innovative, entrepreneurial, business-minded approach to alleviating global poverty.

1 History
2 Unitus Acceleration Model
3 Countries where Unitus works
4 External links

[edit] History

In early 2000, a group of friends met to discuss how they could alleviate poverty, thus sowing the seeds that would later become Unitus. They discussed various economic development methodologies including education, microcredit and cooperatives. These initial discussions led to the formation of Unitus Action Groups, where individuals brought friends, family, co-workers or neighbors together to unite their efforts in fighting poverty. Much good came from these Unitus Action Groups. Sizable donations were made to worthy NGOs and projects were engaged in worldwide. But for all their successes, the founders were still not convinced that they were on the road to massive poverty alleviation.

In the context of this self-evaluation, they traveled to Bangladesh in January 2001 to learn about the Grameen Bank and meet with Muhammad Yunus, Grameen’s founder. The trip changed their lives and left them convinced that microcredit was the key to large-scale poverty alleviation. But a question still remained – How could Unitus best leverage microcredit? Thousands of microcredit institutions (MFIs) already existed. And could Unitus really reach scale quickly if they were constrained by building a field support organization from scratch? Wouldn’t they just be duplicating and overlapping efforts if they created one of their own?

With some advice from Muhammad Yunus, they veered in a new direction and began researching in depth the microfinance industry - its successes, failures, strengths, weaknesses and opportunities. After months of study and industry evaluation, a new strategy was developed for Unitus – one which truly could eliminate poverty for millions of people – The Unitus Acceleration Model. Many of those founding friends are still Unitus board members and remain as committed as ever to alleviating worldwide poverty on a massive scale.

[edit] Unitus Acceleration Model

Unitus has developed a new way to accelerate the growth of microfinance institutions (MFIs) worldwide. Focused on exponential institutional growth, they carefully select the highest-potential MFIs operating in developing countries and provide both capital and capacity-building consulting while connecting these MFIs to capital markets.

There are five phases in the Unitus Acceleration Model:

Identify potential regions and partners
Select an MFI partner
Structure the investment
Grow the MFI
Exit the investment

[edit] Countries where Unitus works

Unitus currently has microfinance partners in Argentina, India, Kenya and Mexico. The complete current list can be found here. Partners by country (as of April 2006) included: