Making A Better World - Milton Louw

I am sitting in Germany struggling to establish a Credit Register System in Namibia. I have been working on this project for over 12 years in the hope that with such a system there would be more affordable credit for poor people and small- and medium-sized enterprises (SME's) in my country. With very little funding (and no salary), I have managed to get this idea on to the national agenda. All financial institutions and supervisory bodies understand the need for a credit register system to allow financial inclusion - access to banking services especially by the poor, black people of our country. To get this idea to the public I have been sending emails to individuals within government and the business sector since 1997. This morning (6 April 2011) I sent a copy of a blog about the need for a Credit Register in India to the financial services community in Namibia. "... one of the major complaints against micro-finance institutions (MFIs) is the widespread trend of multiple...

Why is Reconciliation important to me - My father was in the South African Army that occupied this country. Even when I was arrested in 1988 as part of the uprising, he could not understand my views. With the policy of reconciliation, I was better able to understand and forgive him. It was disturbing today to look at some of the pictures printed by the Swapo News Editor, Asser Ntinda, today 25 February 2011. The pictures were truly gruesome - but that was not the most disturbing.The writer seemed to miss completely the spirit of what Reconciliation is. Identifying ways in which offenders are assisted to redress the material and emotional damage they have inflicted through self-reflection, acknowledgment of responsibility, remorse, and compensation would be an important step towards establishing an environment of reconciliation. I therefore cut some excerpts from an online paper to once again define what our National Reconciliation should entail in Namibia What Does Reconcil...

The whole world is becoming focussed on social media and the number of users on Facebook, Twitter, etc. However, very little reliable information or statistics seems to be available about Namibian user and their preferences. So, while I had very little to do this weekend while sitting in a cold Düsseldorf, I decided to look at what figures I could put together. This first place to start was Twitter. Twitter is the site where I get most of my introductions to a topic after which I may decide to look into it further and click on the link. Because of the limit of only 140 characters, I don’t have to worry much about missing a comment by a friend because some other “friends” has loaded dozens of pictures or played lots of games. News providers I started my Twitter search by looking at the Namibian media, that is, the companies or websites who provide information on Namibia. This is what I found in order of the most followers (as at 22.02.11): #namibia_news - 1,980 followers. Mos...

I quote from a paper by R van der Ross at the Symposium on Slavery 2008 – “The question of identity is one which elicits wide, wordy and largely useless response. In this country there is continuous debate about the matter, and mostly about and from the Coloured people. Who are we? Why? Where from? Where to? Some even ask: Are we? Are there Coloured people? The ridiculousness of these questions is compounded by the attempts at answers: “We are not; we are not Coloured; we are simply human; we are, but we refuse to be called Coloured,” and so into various degrees of assininity. If the matter of mixed descent is raised, it will most likely be met with the response that all the peoples of the earth are mixed. Of course there is some truth in this, but it evades the other truth namely that which the philosophers call “immediate perception.” We are Coloured because people look at us and regard us as Coloured. Finish en klaar.” http://alturl.com/f4k9w

I have just received a briefing paper from the Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik / German Development Institute concerning "The potential of pro-market activism as a tool for making finance work for Africa: a political economy perspective". The author argues that: " This suggests that information on creditworthiness is basically a public good, in the sense that it is non-rival in consumption and it is very costly to exclude anyone from using it. When the market fails to let banks appropriate the returns of information about their costumers, banks will under-invest in the acquisition of such information. ..... Credit registries give access to clients’ credit history and increase the transparency of borrower quality, which makes it safer for financial institutions to lend to new customers. ....... The Kenyan Central Bank (CBK) took the initiative and issued a regulation which mandated financial institutions to share information with credit bureaus ." ...