...and Sam and Beth.I just talked about microfinance on the Washington, DC-area talk show hosted by Kojo Nnamdi. Also on were Sam Daley-Harris and Elisabeth Rhyne.You can listen here.Sam founded RESULTS and the closely-connected Microcredit Summit Campaign mentioned in my previous post. He has done perhaps more than anyone else to introduce microcredit and Muhammad Yunus to the American public and make microcredit funding a priority in the U.S. Congress. More importantly, he used to belong to my pool. Beth led the U.S. Agency for International Development's Microenterprise Initiative in the late 1990s, I guess amply funded thanks to Sam, then moved to Accion International, where she now directs its Center for Financial Inclusion, which is amply funded thanks to capital gains from the Compartamos IPO. She wrote one of my absolute favorite books about microfinance, Mainstreaming Microfinance: How Lending to the Poor Began, Grew, and Came of Age in Bolivia.I've been asked before what being on the show is like. Imagine someone comes up to you and asks most intently, What are the major causes of the global financial crisis? 30 seconds into your improvised monologue on this complex issue, your questioner's body language begins to suggest it's time to wrap up. You do, maybe accelerating a bit just before you screech to a halt. Then the questioner turns to someone next to you and asks a vaguely related question, like Are mortgage rates likely to stay low? It is not a natural conversation. The funny thing is that it sounds fluid on the air. Humans are flexible listeners.
