Making A Better World - Milton Louw

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 ." ...

In 2004 I returned from Germany and started up my company, NamBizDotCom, which is registered as a Close Corporation. I was working on two contracts at the time involving SME’s. The first was in cooperation with SMEs Compete and included a trip to South Africa and Angola to look for possible partners in these countries. The second contract, was for the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) and was to complete the SME Impact Assessment Survey for 2004. Unfortunately, my father was declared disabled and unable to continue working. He was 54 and no longer able to generate an income. This started a financial calamity that still haunts me till today. Firstly, the bank, FNB, passed on the insurance claim to Metropolitan Insurance who did not want to accept his disability and therefore allow for his insurance to cover the cost of the home loan. The buck was passed between the two institutions and this delay meant my father was in arrears on his home loan. The bank therefore duly put his ...