Lancaster Newspapers: Muhammad Yunus of Pakistan pioneered a microfinance system that has provided small loans to more than 100 million people living in poverty. Chuck Waterfield of Lancaster is an internationally known microfinance expert who is determined to foster Yunus’ dream in growing nonprofit, humanitarian banking.

Gulf Weekly: In an effort to head off a potential crisis in the fast-expanding micro-finance industry, its leaders are adopting global truth-in-lending standards and creating a system for comparing loan terms offered by competing lenders.

Grameen Foundation: Grameen Foundation joined 46 other organizations to support the launch of Microfinance Transparency at the Asia-Pacific Microcredit Summit, held in Bali, Indonesia, July 27-29. In a speech that became a keystone of the conference, Grameen Foundation board member Muhammad Yunus called for greater transparency by microfinance institutions, challenging lenders to publicly report interest rates and to set them no higher than that which will cover costs.

India Development Blog: Does it seem like the obvious response to this question should be a “Yes!”? An interesting point made by Sanjay Sinha (M-CRIL), at one of the Conference sessions, was how communication would play a key role in ensuring that increased transparency would not backfire on the MFIs.

In November 11-13, 2008 MFTransparency was the lead presenter at a session of the 2008 India Microfinance Summit. This was held in New Delhi. View Chuck Waterfield’s Presentation here.

Oikocredit: On 4 October Oikocredit endorsed, as first Dutch-based organization, MicroFinance Transparency and announced a donation of € 20,000 in this initiative. MFTransparency’s mission is to be the venue for the microfinance industry to publicly demonstrate its commitment to pricing transparency, integrity and poverty alleviation.