The SEEP Practitioner Learning Program (PLP): Reaching Scale in Youth Financial Services, conducted in partnership with The MasterCard Foundation, seeks institutions currently providing or facilitating access to financial services for young people to participate in a unique program.
The PLP is an action learning project that will bring together key stakeholders to explore innovations in youth financial services to help microfinance and microenterprise institutions better respond to the growing need for appropriate and accessible products for young people (ages 12-24 inclusive). The PLP will focus on achieving scale with youth financial services, exploring viable models and seeking to understand critical stages organizations must move through to achieve scale. The envisioned impact of this PLP is to expand the number of youth clients served by appropriate financial services, and improve the quality and breadth of service provision to youth.
The goal of the Practitioner Learning Program: Reaching Scale in Youth Financial Services is that, through peer learning, microfinance practitioners will be better able to serve large numbers of young people with innovative, demand-driven financial services.
The PLP will select four (4) organizations currently serving young people with financial services to become PLP participants. Eligibility for this PLP is not limited to SEEP members.
Applications are due by 14 December 2009. The full RFA is attached below, or can be accessed on the SEEP site here.
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Under the innovative new Youth-Inclusive Financial Services Program (YFS-Link), Making Cents International has designed a ground-breaking new survey on youth-inclusive financial services for youth-serving organizations, financial serving providers, microfinance networks and associations, training and technical assistance providers, and a variety of supporting organizations such as funders and researchers.
Take this brief (10-15 minutes) survey and capitalize on the opportunity to share your perspectives, raise the visibility of your organization’s work, and be profiled as an emerging leader in the nascent sector of youth-inclusive financial services. The results will be included in a report on the state of the sector and will be used to inform the development of curricula that will build the capacity of organizations working in youth-inclusive financial services.
Those who complete the survey will be entered in a drawing to win a free conference registration to the Global Youth Enterprise Conference.
Click here to learn more about the survey to take the survey. After beginning the survey, you can save your answers and come back, but please complete by 11 September 2009 to have your data included in our presentation at the 2009 Global Youth Enterprise Conference.
The SEEP Network is seeking a facilitator for the Innovations in Youth Financial Services PLP. The PLP engages microenterprise practitioners in a collaborative learning process that combines a small-grant program with an intensive small-group facilitated-learning process aimed at addressing learning at three levels: the individual organization, the PLP group, and the industry at large.
Term: 40-50 days per year over 3 years (August 2009-July 2012)
Innovations in Youth Financial Services
Practitioner Learning Program (PLP) Facilitator
Scope of Work
Summary:
The SEEP Network, founded in 1985 and headquartered in Washington, DC, is an association of international NGOs that support micro and small enterprise development programs around the world. SEEP’s mission is to connect microenterprise practitioners in a global learning community.
The Practitioner Learning Program (PLP) methodology was developed by SEEP as a key way to engage microenterprise practitioners in a collaborative learning process, and to document and share practical, innovative solutions to key challenges in the industry. The PLP combines a small-grant program with an intensive small-group facilitated-learning process, incorporating in-person workshops, email listservs and phone calls, peer exchanges, and distance learning. Practitioner Learning Programs focus on learning at three levels: the individual organization, the PLP group, and the industry at large.
The Practitioner Learning Program (PLP) Facilitator works closely with SEEP to design and implement the learning agenda and dissemination strategy for the PLP. The PLP Facilitator is the lead technical expert for the PLP and, together with the Senior Program Manager, designs and implements the PLP learning experience.
The planned PLP will explore innovations in the field of youth financial services. The expected result will be stronger microfinance institutions better able to respond to the growing demand worldwide for appropriate and accessible financial services for youth.
The PLP Facilitator monitors grantees’ progress, provides training, technical assistance, and mentoring to participants, and is responsible for drawing out and documenting lessons learned across participant programs. The PLP Facilitator works on a consistent, part-time basis and reports to the PLP Senior Program Manager.
Responsibilities:
Program Design
- With the Senior Program Manager, writes the PLP concept paper and Request for Applications for approval by MasterCard Foundation;
- Designs the specific learning questions for the PLP;
- Designs and facilitates a dissemination strategy that will include meetings, workshops, and documentation of lessons learned;
Learning Facilitation
- Moderates technical discussions on an email-based listserv for the thematic area;
- Monitors participant progress on a regular basis to ensure activities are on track and focused on the key learning questions;
- Designs and facilitates closing PLP workshop;
- Makes site visits to PLP participants as needed;
- Facilitates and collaborates with SEEP’s working groups and other strategic partners as needed;
- With the Senior Program Manager, identifies qualified resource persons and organizations to provide additional specialized knowledge, as needed;
- Provides training, technical assistance, and mentoring to PLP participants through meetings and workshops, the workspace, the listserv, telephone calls, and site visits;
Reporting and Dissemination
- Reports regularly to the Senior Program Manager on program activities and progress;
- Assists PLP participants to document their lessons learned in 3-5 practical, easy-to-use learning products (e.g. technical tools, progress notes, briefs, and case studies) to benefit the youth microenterprise field;
- Presents the lessons learned from the PLP at workshops and conferences, as necessary;
- Links key learning and results of PLP activities to other industry initiatives and audiences;
- Makes recommendations to SEEP on improving the PLP learning process.
Level of Effort:
The expected scope of work is approximately 40-50 days per year for 3 years, for a total of 120-150 days. The duration of this work is approximately August 2009 through July 2012. The relevant tasks are tentatively scheduled as follows (subject to change):
Program design and participant selection:
September – December 2009Kickoff workshop:
April 2010Facilitated learning activities:
April 2010 – February 2011Development of learning products: May 2010 – June 2011
Closing workshop:
May 2011Travel Requirements:
The PLP Facilitator is required to travel to PLP-related events, including PLP meetings and workshops. The PLP Facilitator may be required to make site visits to individual participants to provide hands-on training, technical assistance, and mentoring as necessary. Also, the PLP Facilitator may be asked to represent the PLP at SEEP’s Annual Conference or at other key industry events.Qualifications:
- Excellent facilitation and training skills in cross-cultural settings;
- At least five years of experience related to youth financial services required;
- Substantial experience in international development, including knowledge of current practice and trends in the youth microfinance/microenterprise field;
- Strong oral and written communication skills and excellent organizational skills;
- Fluency in English;
- Proficiency in an additional language (Spanish, French, Arabic, etc) highly desirable;
- Skilled in Web-based communications, with full-time, high-speed web access.
Application Deadline:
The deadline to send a letter of interest and CV is August 17, 2009.Contact:
Please send applications and any questions to:
Laura Meissner, Senior Program Manager, The SEEP Network
meissner@seepnetwork.org or +1 202-534-1403
Aflatoun is a Dutch non-profit organization focused on social and financial education for children between the ages of 6-14 years. The Aflatoun program is currently operational in 22 countries reaching over 500,000 children (approximately 200,000 of which have started either individual or group savings accounts), and program materials have been translated into 11 languages.
As we’ve grown, we have struggled to find a meaningful, accurate and cost-reasonable way of measuring our work and our impacts. That process is the subject of this post.
Aflatoun's aim is to help children learn to believe in themselves, understand their rights and responsibilities, save money, plan and budget, and even start their own school-based social and micro enterprises. We take a multi-faceted approach: providing our partners an educational programme for children, advocating for policy change in the area of Child Social and Financial Education, and coordinating a network of like-minded organizations and stakeholders.
In our early days, we tried a number of conventional evaluation techniques to track and measure our effectiveness but became increasingly frustrated with them. We didn’t feel these tools were able to properly disaggregate the value of the different streams of work we were doing. In response, we began exploring the emerging field of Social Return on Investment (SROI), because it seemed to offer a common format for analysing and valuing different endeavours. We’ve now been working to complete a SROI calculation for our work since 2005.
What we see as the key innovation here – and how this differs from a cost-benefit analysis approach – is that SROI aims to capture and value the social benefits of a particular intervention and report these in relation to more conventional financial returns. For example, SROI ratio of 2:1 indicates that for every dollar invested by an organisation two dollars of value – economic and social – are generated. Pretty appealing concept, huh?
It’s not easy to execute though. The historic difficult with using SROI analysis has been twofold:
- How to do the actual calculation of a Social Return on Investment
- How to do methodologically sound valuations of social returns
Since 2005, we have committed ourselves to overcoming these, working in partnership with two initiatives based in the Netherlands: socialevaluator.eu, a new social venture developing a web-based SROI calculation tool and Context International Cooperation, which has been doing pilot evaluations with 10 NGOs in developing countries using community members to do SROI calculations (an approach we like because it enables target beneficiaries to value programmes).
When we began working on our SROI calculation, it was an early attempt to put a value on the different types of work that we were doing and to analyse them in a common format. The process now allows all our work to be assessed based on the inputs that we put in. This contribution-based approach has required us to both budget and manage our organizational efforts in line with a well-defined strategic plan. In essence, the activities and cost structure of the organization have had to be aligned with the activities that are actually being performed. This gives us a clear idea of all our inputs, both in terms of both finance and labour, towards all of our organizational goals. It has also required us to keep track of the costs of implementation for our partners on a per child basis.
In the coming months, we will be doing a SROI calculation for both our work as a secretariat with socialevaluator.eu and adapting the participatory approach developed with Context for our partners to do for their programmes, starting with International Child Support this summer.
We expect these experiments to go well and enable us to improve our performance monitoring and better understand the different value we create through our work for both our partners and the children they support. We hope to be able to update CYES as we progress and, in the mean time, would be excited to hear from others working with similar tools and are happy to help anyone moving into this area.
