I have always been a great believer in the communication potential of microcredit.

Today, I was reading about the first leadership course for microfinance executives run by Wharton’s Aresty Institute for Executive Education.

Karim Fanous of Egypt’s  Lead Foundation, one of the participants, mentioned in the interview the importance of communication as one of the main lessons he is taking from the course. “We need to raise awareness about what microfinance is, how it impacts so many people and how it’s absolutely vital.”

I was delighted to read this…The importance of communication for microcredit organisations is one of the main messages of our book.

The reason why communication for microfinance is so exciting is that you get to tell the stories behind the loans, the difference these make to the lives of the borrowers, the impact these have on their communities…

As Mary Ellen Iskenderian, President of Women’s World Banking, said in the article, microcredit is “a high-touch business with high operating costs because of this very deep relationship with the client”. Communicators should use this relationship as a source of stories.

Stories give a voice to the soul of a project. They create an emotional appeal. They are a powerful tool for spreading the message of microcredit.

As Fanous said, “people need to know these are professionally run institutions with a social mission”. That’s what good business communication is for.

Women are the last group in the world to enjoy full democracy.

This is what Noble Prize Winner Shirin Ebadi believes due to the discrimination women face in “all countries without exception”.

The Iranian human rights activist spoke at the Women in Education and Employment conference organised by the European Training Foundation (ETF), an agency of the European Union, in 2006.

ETF contributes to the development of education and training in the EU’s partner countries. Promoting gender equality is high on its agenda.

The International Women’s Day  on March 8th is coming up. It will be its 100th anniversary next year!

ETF is organising an international conference on the vision of women in education and employment in Turin on 7-8 March 2010.

We are preparing for the event and ETF would like to engage in a dialogue online with female bloggers and women who write about gender issues on the web.

It’s so exciting! I will be helping ETF to identify these women and manage the dialogue.

We will discuss gender equality, school-to-work transition, female economic participation, women entrepreneurs…. and much more.

The conclusions from the dialogue will be discussed at a workshop to be held during the conference and will be presented to international policy makers.

If you  are based in MENA, former Yugoslavia, Turkey, Russia, Caucasus or Central Asia and you blog/write about women’s issues, please get in touch with me through this site or direct-message me at @XCulture.

I just learned on Twitter that today is Interdependence Day, the idea being that what one person does has an effect on the entire world.

I guess we really learned that lesson during the subprime crisis and its aftermath, which is still wreaking havoc.

It is not surprising that, with the international banking community still traumatised, microcredit is experiencing a revival.

Given its high repayment rates and social character, the microfinance industry is attracting a new influx of private capital with institutional investors transforming microcredit institutions, previously run like NGOs, into more formalised entities.

Good news for the poor and in particular for women?

Not so sure.

Women’s World Banking (WWB) has been studying this phenomenon and is warning the microfinance world against the dangers of the “mission drift” this transformation is causing.

WWB has discovered that the percentage of women clients served by formalised microfinance institutions tends to decline after their transformation.

In the fourth year after transformation, the average percentage of women borrowers usually drops from 77 to 60 per cent. This is due to lenders migrating from their original mission to serve low-income clients towards generating profits for their new shareholders and maintaining high-interest rates.

Women in the developing world, who are often illiterate and own no collateral, are the most vulnerable client group.

Microfinance works. It provides communities with viable structures. The challenge of the coming years will be to make sure that it remains true to its roots. For multinationals operating in the developing world this challenge represents a unique opportunity to become involved in new type of initiative with the potential of ending poverty.

This is what Corporate Social Responsibility in the era of global interdependence is all about.

I don’t do mornings.

It takes me a long time to get going in the morning. So I have a number of mantras I chant under the shower.

“I live an enchanted life” is one of them.

Last week I saw it come true during my trip to the US.

I had a series of enchanted moments that made my stay in California and Colorado very special and took away the stress of the past month.

One day, I entered my hotel room in Denver while the maid was cleaning it. The book on my night table, Three Cups of Tea, the incredibly moving story of Greg Mortenson’s work, caught her eye.

“What’s your name?” she asked and added “mine is Ida”.

There was this light in her eyes. Was it because we care about the same things?

The next morning, I was the only passenger on the shuttle bus back to the airport. The driver, Samuel from Ethiopia, bought me coffee and talked to me about spirituality.

And of course, I had a great time giving a presentation on Corporate Social Responsibility at IABC’s Southern Region conference.

I was delighted to see that CSR, a real passion of mine, is drawing so much interest. I am particularly happy that the people in my session were so interested in the case study I presented about Grameen and Danone.

Given how fond I am of Prof. Yunus, I can talk non-stop about Grameen.

At the end of my trip, I spent a couple of days in Napa with my friend’s daughter, Lana.

The day before I left we made a card for my mum and drew a rainbow on it.

And guess what…I woke up the next day, went outside and there it was…this enormous rainbow…the biggest Lana and I have ever seen.

I do live an enchanted life.

Sometimes one person is enough to turn a conference into the experience of a lifetime.

Widad Ibrahim grew up in Sudan on a farm owned by her grandmother.

She used to sell eggs at the side of the road. This is how she developed her business sense and how she got the idea to start selling apartments in Khartoum.

One business led to another and Widad now owns one of the largest industrial groups in Sudan with 800 employees. Her Bee Group includes gas stations, an oil company, an aviation business and a property development company.

I was sitting in a conference room at the World Bank with tears in my eyes. Something in that story sounded close to home. My grandmother, who used to manage a farm in post-war Italy, would have been very proud of Widad.

What an incredible story!

And there is more.

In 2002, Widad asked the male-only Businessmen Union in Khartoum to give her a room where women entrepreneurs could meet. In 2006, for the first time in the history of Sudan, a woman was elected to join the Union.

Widad visited Grameen Bank and got the idea to start the first micro-credit bank in Sudan. Her Family Bank, set up with other Sudanese business women, has more than 35 million US$ in its accounts.

During the train ride back to New York, I couldn’t shake Widad’s face from my mind. Her colourful hijab and the beautiful henna drawings on her hands and feet. Such an inspiring presence.

I am so fortunate to have heard her story. It is one that I will continue telling, again and again.

There is something special about the desert wind.

I landed in Doha the other night and getting out of the plane felt like being embraced by a giant warm force. It went right through the essence of my being, warming up not only my London-weather-battered bones but also my soul. Deserts are such spiritual places.

And the spell continued on my connecting flight to Dubai. I watched a fellow passenger in the row next to me reciting his prayers. The small light above his seat shining on the beautiful Arabic characters of his book and the sleeves of his djellaba forming a snow-white aura around it.

I imagined his prayers merging in the air with those my 100-year-old grandmother in Italy recites every time I fly. Words in two very different languages travelling to the same place.

I have to admit the shopping spree I embarked on yesterday afternoon at Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates was somewhat less spiritual.

So I thought I would buy myself a book likely to make me think: Creating a World Without Poverty by Muhammad Yunus. My readers know how fond I am of Prof. Yunus and will understand that I could not wait to be back to the hotel to open the book.

I sat down in a corner of the mall and began reading….

As expected, I did find something that made me think. In the list of things he would like to see emerge by 2050, Yunus writes:

“Everybody will read and hear everything in his own language. Technology will make it possible for a person to speak, read, and write in his own language while the listener will hear and the reader will read the message in his own language. Software and gadgets will translate simultaneously as one speaks or downloads any text….”

I don’t doubt this is likely to happen. I am only thinking of all the hours I spent learning the languages I speak and how much the experience has become part of who I am.

Will people stop learning languages in the future? Will technology replace the effort to understand other cultures? Or will it make it easier?

It was a story that sold microcredit to me.

I was working at a congress in Berlin years ago and Prof Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank, was our key-note speaker.

He told me a story about a woman Grameen had helped in Bangladesh. I was so moved. My mascara was running all over my face, but I just sat there and listened.

It was such a powerful story. I used it years later at a training session I was doing for a group of women in Bulgaria and they all had tears in their eyes.

I heard another inspiring microcredit story last week.

Naina Lal Kidwai, HSBC India’s chief executive, was speaking at the World Traders’ and shared a personal experience:

“I was at this typical village gathering [of women who receive microcredit] when a woman stood up and with great pride and confidence told us my ‘name is Rudiben. Until 5 years ago I was known as my husband’s wife and my son’s mother. Today I am known as Rudiben’”.

I was very pleased to learn that a main stream bank like HSBC is supporting microcredit. This wasn’t always the case when Prof. Yunus started off in the 1970s.

One of the women’s organisations I am involved in, TIAW, runs a series of successful microcredit programs.

And I was delighted to hear that our Prime Time Village bank program just raised US$ 42,000 at its February Gala in Singapore. Enough money to set up eight village banks in Asia!