Community meeting on regulating Micro Finance

MICRO FINANCE: The Sanvada (Dialogue) special programme of the Pathfinder Foundation in co-operation with the Sri Lanka Business Development Centre (SLBDC) is organising a stakeholder community meeting to discuss the proposed micro finance legislation in Sri Lanka.

This meeting will be held on April 27, from 9.00 a.m. to 1.30 p.m. at the Sri Lanka Foundation Institute. key note address by will be done by Dr. S.P. Premaratne Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Colombo. It is based on an analytical study commissioned by the Pathfinder Foundation.

This is the first of the series of studies and stakeholder community meetings to be organised by the Sanvada project on economic policy related legislation to be taken up by Parliament.

The objective of the Sanvada Project is to facilitate an objective debate among key stakeholders including the Parliamentarians.

The meeting to be chaired by the Chairman of the Pathfinder Foundation, former Central bank Governor A.S. Jayawardena, will also have two other important presentations on regional experiences; i.e.

(1) Cambodian Micro Finance Legislation by David Bartocha of GTZ-PROMIS and

(2) Bangladesh Micro Finance Legislation by Shahid Hassan, The Country Programme Co-ordinator of Bangladesh Rural Action Committee (BRAC).

Most useful to the stakeholders such as, micro finance institutions, commercial banks with micro finance lending windows and senior policy makers will be the two-hour open forum to be moderated by Dr. M.U.A. Tennekoon, former Central Banker with wide knowledge and exposure to the micro finance sector in Sri Lanka.

Another noteworthy feature of the community meeting will be the availability of simultaneous translation of the proceedings to Sinhala/Tamil and English.

It is expected that this will facilitate effective participation and dialogue among all three language speakers.