Brazilians, as I’ve learned from having lived in the Northeast of the country over the past several months, love credit. Common are the signs sitting in most São Paulo storefronts that advertise the interest rate of products by the “vez”. The number of “vezes” or “aprestações” is the number of months across which the full price of a product can be divided, giving the consumer the number of installments in which one is allowed to pay for a good that can range from a car to a cellular phone to a t-shirt to a plate of beans and rice.

MFTransparency has received grant from the Ford Foundation to promote fair and transparent pricing in the microfinance industry in Argentina, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador. The effort, known as the Transparent Pricing Initiative, will launch later this month.

Asli Demirguc-Kunt, a chief economist at the World Bank, recently posted an article entitled “Microfinance: Dream versus Reality”. Her post provides an overview of the tough tradeoffs faced by microfinance institutions: between serving the poorest clients and achieving financial sustainability (and profitability).

In March 2010, MFTransparency presented at the Sa-Dhan National Microfinance Conference in Delhi, India. The theme of this conference was ‘Financial Inclusion and Responsible Microfinance. View the presentations here.

Over the last few weeks, I have been reviewing the Global Financial Education Program led by a strategic partnership between Microfinance Opportunities and Freedom from Hunger. The Financial Education Curriculum is targeted at households below and just above the poverty line in developing countries. So far, I have focused my review on the core curriculum which consists of five modules: budgeting, debt management, savings, bank services and financial negotiations.

A few weeks ago I made an unplanned and very interesting trip to India. MFTransparency had no plans of working in India this year, but a broad group of stakeholders in the India microfinance industry had been discussing the need for pricing transparency and then invited us to come and meet with them.

Mobile banking is defining modern microfinance. Within the space of a few short years it has exploded to become a hot-button issue in the microfinance community, especially because of its potential to reach the unbanked.

Today I’m going to demonstrate how to write a computer program that is as accurate as Excel 2007′s XIRR function. This article is likely to be of less broad interest, but it provides transparency into how we will calculate interest rates for future data collection trips; and it may be useful for MFIs that wish to automate interest rate calculations for a larger data set than can be handled with Excel.