MFTransparency TEDx Talk – Ending World Poverty or Profiteering from the Poor?
October 5th 2013, MFTransparency’s CEO, Chuck Waterfield had an inspiring talk at the Colonial Theater at Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, USA as part of the TEDxPheonixville 2013 Live Event. For the fourth year, TEDxPhonexville hosted a one-day live event that gathers motivational speakers from the local community on different topics. The event’s theme this year was “To be determined”. It was split into three sessions, one on “past perseverance”, another on “present performance”, and a third on “future potential.”
Chuck was invited to give a 12 minutes talk titled “Ending World Poverty or Profiteering from the Poor? Using Transparency to Go Beyond the Microfinance Headlines“. He began with a brief history of microfinance up until the crisis in India when high profits and obscure prices came under great scrutiny. As a means of engaging the audience, they were asked to identify and compare the true costs of loans where pricing was advertised in different ways – with the ultimate objective of illustrating the difficulty of calculating and understanding true prices for microfinance clients. Finally, Chuck talked about the industry’s broad willingness to resolve the problem of non-transparent pricing and support the establishment of MFTransparency.
Chuck ended his compelling talk with a quote by the Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel, whom once said “Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself. In a free society, few are guilty, but all are responsible.” Chuck noted that “We all are responsible for demanding justice for one another. My vision is that all of us would be open to performing the actions our hearts lead us to do.”
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About TED and TEDx:
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading”. It started as a 4-day conference in California in 1984 bringing together people from three particular fields; namely, technology, entertainment, and design. Since then, the organization’s scope has broadened to include “world-changing ideas with multiple initiatives”.
Created in the spirit of TED’s mission, “ideas worth spreading,” the TEDx program is designed to give communities, organizations, and individuals the opportunity to stimulate dialogue through TED-like experiences at the local level. TEDx events are fully planned and coordinated independently, on a community-by-community basis.
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