Bill Gates came to the Chicago Council’s Symposium on Global Agriculture and Food Security with a confession. “I’ve never been a farmer,” he said. “Until recently, I rarely set foot on farm.”

Farmer Gates, no. But Innovator Gates, certainly.

So this was one of his messages to a standing room crowd. In ending hunger through agriculture development, innovation is the key.

First, the challenge:

“Right now,” he said. “the average farmer in sub-Saharan Africa gets just over a ton of cereal per acre. An Indian farmer gets twice that; a Chinese farmer five times that; an American farmer seven times that. Why is there this huge disparity? Farmers in other regions have tools and techniques and resources that African farmers do not. By offering farming families in Africa and South Asia those advantages, the least productive farms can come closer to the most productive.”

“How,” he asked, “can the world help the poorest farmers grow and sell more? The key is in innovation – combining the best of what’s worked in the past with new breakthroughs, customized to the needs of small farmers.

“Innovation in seeds brings small farmers new high-yield crops that can grow in a drought, survive in a flood and resist pests and disease.

“Innovation in markets offers small farmers access to reliable customers.

“Innovation in agriculture techniques helps farmers increase productivity while preserving the environment – with approaches like no-till farming, rainwater harvesting and drip irrigation.

“Innovation in foreign assistance means that donors now support national plans that provide farming families with new seeds, tools, techniques and markets. This approach is reducing overlap and keeping developing countries in the lead.”

Innovation needs good ideas, and money. Here, Gates said, “The U.S. has a pivotal role to play in helping farming families lift themselves out of poverty and hunger. At the same time, of course, we have a big budget deficit and foreign assistance is an easy target for reduction. We need to tell people over and over why this spending is a good investment, why it’s worth it even in tight economic times.”

First, he said, “these investments are going to countries committed to change.”

“The second reason agricultural investments are worthwhile,” he added, “is that farming is a business. As you provide poor farmers business assistance through new tools and technology and access to markets and capital, it allows them to move to self-sufficiency with the help of market forces.”

Roger Thurow, author and Senior Fellow of Global Agriculture & Food Policy, speaks about hunger and food security at Opportunity's Fall 2010 Microfinance Conference.

“The third reason agricultural development is a smart investment is how effective it is. In country after country, these approaches have improved the livelihoods of small farmers while reducing poverty and increasing economic growth. It’s proving the point again and again: helping poor farming families grow more crops is the world’s single most powerful lever for reducing poverty and hunger.”

These comments from Bill Gates, whose foundation with his wife Melinda has committed $1.7 billion to help farming families over the last five years, suggest again, as we’ve often said in this column, that we have arrived at a moment of potential opportunity that shouldn’t be squandered. The budget crisis, he suggested, shouldn’t be reason for the U.S. to cut back on its promises to increase agriculture development aid, to scale back its Feed the Future ambitions.

“This is the first stage of sweeping change for farming families in the poorest parts of the world,” Gates said. “We have an historic chance to help people and countries move from dependency to self-sufficiency–and fulfill the highest promise of foreign aid. In the past we’ve invested aid in Brazil and India and South Korea, and they are all now dynamic actors in the global economy–some even joining to help provide aid to others. This is our hope for the countries of Africa and South Asia as well.”

To read Thurow’s original post on the Global Food for Thought blog, click here. Follow the event on Twitter at #GADIsymposium.

Keynote Speakers:

• Bill Gates, Co-chair and Trustee, The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Rajiv Shah, Administrator, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID)
• Thomas Vilsack, Secretary, U.S. Department of Agriculture

The objective of the symposium is to review progress on the U.S. government’s approach to agricultural development and food security strategy, and provide critical thinking on how best to overcome potential obstacles to success. They’re also discussing how long-term U.S. public and private sector support for agricultural development can advance global security, stability, and economic prosperity, offering constructive thinking on future implementation challenges.

The Chicago Council’s Senior Fellow Roger Thurow posted an update from the conference on the Global Food for Thought blog and the Council released its 2011 Progress Report on US Leadership in Agricultural Development. Follow along on all the events of the day on Twitter @GlobalAgDev and #GADISymposium.

This morning, Rajiv Shah delivered the keynote address, policymakers and activists presented the 2011 Progress Report, and a panel led a discussion on “The Case for Food Security.”

At 12:00 p.m. ET, Bill Gates took the stage to give the lunchtime keynote speech, drawing attention to farming families in the developing world and the important role they play in cutting hunger and poverty. In a blog he posted a couple weeks ago at gatesfoundation.org, Gates said:

Why farming? Many people don’t realize it, but most of the world’s poorest people are small farmers. They get their food and income farming small plots of land. These farming families often don’t have good seeds, equipment, reliable markets, or money to invest that helps them get the most out of their land. So they work hard, but they get no traction, and more often than not, they stay hungry and poor.

We know that smart investments in farming families help them become self-sufficient. We know that increasing productivity while preserving the environment leads to higher incomes and better lives over the long-term. But governments are not living up to their pledges to provide this kind of support to small farmers.

Solving hunger and poverty is both an urgent problem and long-term challenge. But what gives me hope is that we know that investments are working.

On the impact of the Gates Foundation’s work, he says, “Our foundation has invested $1.7 billion to date to help small[holder] farmers in Africa and South Asia. We have seen great progress in the work of our grantees and other organizations.” At Opportunity International, we’re proud to partner with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and The MasterCard Foundation, which co-funded a $16 million program to provide access to Opportunity savings accounts and agricultural microfinance loans in rural areas of sub-Saharan Africa, where less than 10% of people have access to comprehensive financial services.

Today in his speech, Gates said, “Helping poor farming families is the answer. It’s the best way to fight poverty and hunger.” For more updates from the symposium, follow #GADISymposium on Twitter, check out the Chicago Council’s Global Food for Thought blog and the Gates Foundation blog for more updates from the day.

For more on Opportunity International’s impact on food security and smallholder farmers, watch “Harvesting Hope”:

Daniel shared the story of his childhood as a Rwandan refugee living in Uganda, and how he struggled to get an education, the only child in his family to go to university. He also told us about his work at Opportunity Rwanda guiding staff members to incorporate transformative training into their daily contact with our microfinance clients. As he told us, “Poverty is not just a deficit, not just a lack of resources, it is a deprivation. It is a trap with many cords. If you offer one solution–loans–but there are other problems related to health or financial education, the client cannot get out of the poverty trap.”

Would you like to meet Daniel for yourself? Join Opportunity supporters at the Breakfast for Tanzania in Boston, where Daniel will be a guest speaker along with award-winning author and journalist Roger Thurow. Get tickets to this event here »

Daniel also invites you to join him at other U.S. events during his visit:

International Visitor Daniel Ryumugabe of Opportunity Rwanda from Opportunity International on Vimeo.

Roger Thurow: I chose [Banker to the Poor] for the power of the story that [Yunus] tells–the founding of Grameen Bank and the success that it has had and the implications of the whole micro-lending aspect to improve agriculture, to reduce hunger, to advance this green revolution; looking at what he was doing, the importance of making capital available to the very poorest people who need help to get started on the climb out of poverty.

Roger Thurow, impassioned advocate for the eradication of poverty and global hunger, speaks at Opportunity's Fall 2010 Microfinance Conference.

On the cover of my copy there’s an old wooden ladder, and the symbolism of that when you are so poor–for the $1, $2-a-day people, is so important–that ladder to get started and climb out of the poverty they are in. That book helped me understand the importance of microfinance so that the smallholder farmers can access the improved seed varieties, the little amounts of fertilizer they need and can share the risks of farming. Financing and lending is the lifeblood of agriculture for farmers anywhere in the world because you are planting and doing the work before the harvest comes in. You need something to get started. For so long the smallholder farmers of Africa have had very little access to financing, so micro-lending coming to rural areas of Africa has been and is becoming increasingly important.

Interviewer: Where in Africa has this been happening?

Thurow: You see it in a number of countries. Certainly in Malawi, and with Opportunity International Bank–I followed them around in Malawi and saw how important it is for [smallholder] farmers. You’re going to start seeing it in most stable African countries where the government is committed to boosting agriculture–Ghana, Kenya, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and it is starting to spread. Then the next step is the new crop insurance. So, as these farmers are taking these loans, which implies some kind of risk because they’ll have to pay them back when the harvest comes in, they are taking out insurance. So, if there is a drought or something that ruins their crop they have this insurance–again, a financial instrument that has long been available to most farmers in the world. To have that kind of insurance to go along with the micro-lending then shares the risk, so you take the loan, you plant the better seeds, you use the fertiliser and then if something happens and the crop fails you have insurance to pay it back. The micro-lenders are introducing this insurance themselves because it’s also protection for them.

About Roger Thurow

Thurow is Senior Fellow for Global Agriculture & Food Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and he writes the blog series Outrage & Inspire on the Council’s Global Food for Thought blog. Thurow was a finalist for the 2004 Pulitzer Prize in international reporting, and co-author of the book Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty. Thurow was a plenary session speaker at Opportunity’s Fall 2010 Microfinance Conference in Washington, D.C.

Thurow will be a special guest speaker at the Opportunity Breakfast for Tanzania event next week, Wednesday, May 4th. All are welcome. Buy tickets at opportunity.org/bosbreak »

Lutacho, Kenya

I returned from a day in the field with Kenyan smallholder farmers last week to find these words from U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack as the Newsbrief’s Quote of the Week:

As I travel around the world talking about American agriculture, the one thing that has struck me is how jealous the rest of the world is about extension, how they would love to have the capacity that we have in this country and often, unfortunately, take for granted, of the ability to reach out and gain very useful information and insights to improve productivity.

Exactly, I thought.

Roger Thurow, Global Food for Thought Blog

How the African farmers I had just visited cherished extension services that would bring to them the latest in technology and advice on how to best use it to increase food production. Extension agents were essential in spreading the agricultural revolutions in every part of the world: America, Europe, Asia, Australia, Latin America. Everywhere except Africa. Government budgets didn’t have enough money to fund them, nor political will to insist that they do; international development agencies, in their negligence of agriculture, thought Africa, alone among the continents of the world, could do without them. As a result, the continent’s extension services fell into a woeful state during the past three decades of neglect of agriculture development. In many countries, if there were any extension agents, they did little extending; very few even had bicycles to go from farm to farm.

Secretary Vilsack’s quote continued:

We are trying to replicate that around the world. For global supplies to keep pace with global demands originating in emerging markets and to mitigate price volatility, we have got to embrace proven technologies, and extension can help us do that. It’s not just biotechnology. It’s also conservation tillage. It’s drip irrigation. It’s multiple cropping practices.

It’s planting seeds, one per hole. And spacing the seeds, and the rows, so the seeds will have room to grow without competition from other seeds for water, sun and soil nutrients.

It’s very basic knowledge like this, common practices among backyard gardeners everywhere in the rich world. But it was news to the farmers of western Kenya when Kennedy Wafula came by their farms with advice on how to plant to get better harvests.

He produced a piece of string with a knot tied every 25 centimeters. “Twenty-five. This is the distance between plants,” he told a group of farmers gathered under a big shade tree. “How far?”

“Twenty-five,” they shouted in unison.

He waved a stick that was 75 centimeters long. “Seventy-five,” Kennedy said. “That is the distance between rows.”

Thurow at the Fall 2010 Microfinance Conference.

“Seventy-five,” the farmers repeated.

Kennedy explained, “You dig a hole every 25 centimeters and put in one seed. Only one seed, so there is no competition between many seeds for the fertilizer and water and sun.”

Kennedy led the farmers to a small plot of land to practice the measuring and the preparation. As farmer Geoffrey Sitata followed, I asked him how he traditionally planted. “No measurement, we just scatter the seed,” he said. He made a motion with his right hand, as if throwing dice or tossing feed to chickens. That’s how he planted, scattering a fistful of precious seed willy-nilly. That’s how everybody planted. Nobody had ever come by the farm and told them there was a better, more productive way to do it.

Until Kennedy, a field manager for the One Acre Fund, stopped by. The One Acre Fund is an organization founded by American social entrepreneurs that works with 55,000 farm families in Kenya and Rwanda. One Acre’s main mission is to distribute to Africa’s farmers the simple technology and practical advice that have existed for decades but nobody ever bothered to deliver to African smallholder farmers. The result is that African yields for maize, wheat, rice and other staple crops lag far behind yields in the rich world. And that hunger and malnutrition blanket the African countryside. One Acre farmers are typically able to double or triple maize yields in one year.

Kennedy calls One Acre’s simple sequence of planting practices the “Obama method,” for the American president who is highly revered in western Kenya, where Barack Obama’s father grew up on a small farm. It is also appropriate in another way, for President Obama has made ending hunger through agriculture development a prime pillar of his foreign policy. His Feed the Future Initiative especially seeks to help Africa’s smallholder farmers by creating the conditions for them to be as productive as possible to feed their families, their communities and their countries.

Secretary Vilsack continued to tell those gathered at the USDA Forum in Washington [on Feb. 24, 2011]:

There are a variety of ways in which we can help the world do a better job of providing food to a growing population. So there are serious opportunities here for the United States to provide leadership, and we are prepared to do that.

Extending the knowledge of successful agriculture practices is one of those opportunities. Kenyan farmers often tell me, “Knowledge is power.” That is one form of power Africa is happy to see the U.S. wield.

Roger Thurow at Opportunity’s Microfinance Conference:

From wfp.org: “World Food Day on October 16 reminds the world that around 1 in 7 people alive today are going hungry[...] [Though,] this year, the number of hungry people on Earth went down for the first time in five years, …there are still more than 925 million people, mainly children, who do not eat enough to be healthy.”

At Opportunity’s 2010 Fall Microfinance Conference last weekend, we were inspired by several influential hunger and food security experts.

Roger Thurow, co-author of Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty, senior fellow for Global Agriculture and Food Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, told the conference audience:

[The number of people going hungry in the world] is an outrage to me. But my inspiration is that we have arrived at a great moment of potential opportunity in the fight against hunger. We have plenty of food surpluses in the West, but by helping the hungry to feed themselves and increase their own agricultural production, it not only alleviates hunger but it can encourage economic and social stability overall.

Ambassador Tony Hall, the author of Changing the Face of Hunger, is a tireless advocate for hunger relief, poverty eradication and human rights. In a session, he told attendees what made him join the fight against hunger:

In 1984, as a Congressman from Ohio, I visited Ethiopia during the famine when, in the course of six months, a million people had already died. I went to camp where people were dying of famine, and the doctor told me that he could only help 5 children per day out of 3,000 who were suffering from extreme malnutrition. When the people in the camp saw me, they thought I was a doctor. They began handing me their children so that I could save them. But every single child they handed to me was already dead. There was nothing anyone could do. I never got over that.

So what can you do today, on World Food Day, to fight global hunger? Check out “10 Ways You Can Fight Hunger on World Food Day,” at wfp.org, and support Opportunity’s work to bring microfinance services to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa by donating today.

Watch our video about our work in agricultural finance, “Harvesting Hope”:

“There are many things that call us to this conference, yet what ultimately brings us together this weekend is helping impoverished people work their way out of poverty.” – Member of the board of directors, A.T. Tshibaka, The first plenary session of the 2010 Fall Microfinance Conference 

The Gates Foundation's Tamara Cook speaks about the work being done to bring agricultural microfinance to Malawi.

This very first plenary session kicks off our fall microfinance conference. It’s led by http://www.opportunity.org/blog/westmont-college-optinnow-event/A.T. Tshibaka[/intlink]; author and senior fellow for Global Agriculture and Food Policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, http://www.opportunity.org/blog/opportunity-liveblog-roger-thurows-global-food-for-thought/Roger Thurow[/intlink], and writer for the blog Outrage & Inspire; program officer for Financial Services for the Poor in the Global Development Program at the http://www.opportunity.org/about/strategic-partners/strategic-partner-bill-melinda-gates-foundation/Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation[/intlink], Tamara Cook; senior banking officer for Opportunity Malawi, Chance Tsamwa; and Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, María Otero. 

Just a few of the issues and stories from this exciting session: 

• A.T. Tshibaka: One very exciting initiatives is the http://www.opportunity.org/initiatives/banking-on-africa/Banking on Africa[/intlink]. Speaking about the campaign: ”The goal is to reach five million clients in sub-Saharan Africa by 2015. Considering the impact that will have on their families, we estimate that that initiative affects around 30 million people.”
• Roger Thurow: “One billion people in the world go to bed hungry every night. That is an outrage to me. But my inspiration is that we have arrived at a great moment of potential opportunity in the fight against hunger. We have plenty of food surpluses in the West, but by helping the hungry to feed themselves and increase their own agricultural production, it not only alleviates hunger but it can encourage economic and social stability overall. Obama pledged in his inaugural address to tackle the problem of global hunger. This means that people have enough food to feed themselves and their communities. Which is important because expectations are that by 2050, the world will need to double food production to support the growing population. The solution? Microinsurance and other microfinance products to help protect farmers from natural disasters and to help farmers make ends meet through the growing season.”


A.T. Tshibaka speaks about his life growing up in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the important work being done by Opportunity.

• Tamara Cook: “I met clients in Malawi for whom access to savings accounts can be the key to paying for school fee loans for their children. Just because you introduce a new technology channel or tool, these services can still be ‘high touch.’ Loan officers and other staff members give one-on-one training and help when clients need it.” It is an exciting mix of technological innovation, and personal inspiration and contact.
• Chance Tsamwa: Working in Chinsapo, Malawi, in 2005, she witnessed the work of other microfinance institutions. She says, “Other institutions saw poverty as a lack of basic needs, but at Opportunity we think poverty is lack of knowledge. Our transformational training teaches clients everything they need to know to create a vision for their business, develop a plan, run the business, and manage their money effectively.”
• María Otero: “I have been an admirer of Opportunity for many years. I was the CEO of Accion, and I understand the impact that organizations like Opportunity can have to help the lives of the poor. Addressing poverty through microfinance is a priority of this administration and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Today, microfinance has grown from just microloans, from its beginnings in the 1970s, to a wide variety of expansive microfinance services and products to help them work their way out of poverty. In the State Department, we are committed to eradicating poverty through microfinance, and we feel strongly that this can be a sustainable and profitable solution. And both President Obama and Secretary Clinton are committed to this sustainable solution.”

Members of the audience of this first plenary session received OptINnow gift cards that they can use at the conference or when they return home.

Just before the break, Wendy Cox, vice president of donor experience, announced that because of the generosity of anonymous donors, everyone in the audience received $25 OptINnow gift cards. Conference attendees can use the card this weekend at our OptINnow conference booth, redeeming it to help fund an entrepreneur. Plus, supporters can also add value to the card to help fund entrepreneurs’ loans even faster.

Meet Roger Thurow, author of Enough: Why the World's Poor Starve in an Age of Plenty at a plenary and a breakout session at our 2010 Fall Microfinance Conference.

Every Wednesday, we highlight an article, book or a blog in our “What We’re Reading” series. We feature works that are noteworthy, inspiring, educational or relevant to the work we do at Opportunity. We welcome your comments in the comment field below–tell us what you’re reading, or respond to the piece we’ve highlighted. The following post highlights three authors who will be featured at our 2010 Fall Microfinance Conference this Friday and Saturday, Oct. 8-9.

1. Roger Thurow

The author of http://www.opportunity.org/roger-thurow-enough/Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty[/intlink] will be featured in our very first plenary session of the conference on Friday, October 8 at 8:30-10:00 a.m. ET. He’ll also speak on a panel at the http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/breakout-sessions/breakout session[/intlink], “Poverty in an Age of Plenty,” on Friday. http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/register-for-the-live-stream/Register[/intlink] to watch the live video stream of the plenary session at our http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/conference page[/intlink].

2. Sheryl WuDunn

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and co-author of http://www.opportunity.org/blog/sheryl-wudunn-to-speak-at-opportunitys-fall-microfinance-conference-in-washington-d-c/Half the Sky: Turning Oppression in Opportunity Worldwide[/intlink] will speak at our second plenary session on Friday, 10:30 a.m.-12:00 p.m. ET. http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/register-for-the-live-stream/Register here to watch the live stream of the session.[/intlink]

3. Knight Kiplinger

The respected economic journalist and business forecaster is editor-in-chief of The Kiplinger Letter, Kiplinger’s Personal Finance magazine and KiplingerForecasts.com will speak at our third plenary session, Friday night, 7:45-9:15 p.m. ET. Watch the live stream of the session.

In addition to our streaming live videos, watch our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter for reminders and updates on session schedules. Plus, http://www.opportunity.org/blog-signup/subscribe[/intlink] to the blog for our complete coverage of other speakers, sessions and photos from the conference.

Join us for the Opportunity International Microfinance Conference.

If you can’t be with us this week for the 2010 Fall Microfinance Conference on Friday, Oct. 8-Saturday, Oct. 9 in Washington, D.C., you don’t have to miss out.

We’ll be streaming live video from each of our four plenary sessions at the conference. Tune in to watch live video of speakers, including:

• Sheryl WuDunn, Pulitzer Prize winner and co-author of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide
• Maria Otero, U.S. Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs
• Tamara Cook, Program officer, Financial Services for the Poor, Global Development Program, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Roger Thurow, Author of Enough: Why the World’s Poorest Starve in an Age of Plenty
• Tony Hall, Former U.S. Ambassador, three-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee
• Knight Kiplinger, Respected economic journalist, Editor-in-chief of The Kiplinger Letter
• Claudia Kennedy, The first female three-star general in the U.S. Army

Go to the http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/register-for-the-live-stream/video streaming registration page[/intlink], enter your name and email, and we will send you a login to access videos. Watch our Facebook page and follow us on Twitter for reminders and updates on session schedules. Plus, subscribe to the http://www.opportunity.org/blog/blog[/intlink] for our complete coverage of other speakers, sessions and photos from the conference.  Do not miss the chance to be a part of this event.

REGISTER TO WATCH THE LIVE STREAM

For me, this will be my first http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/Opportunity microfinance conference[/intlink], and I’m really looking forward to hearing from guest http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/speakers/speakers[/intlink] like Pulitzer Prize-winner http://www.opportunity.org/blog/sheryl-wudunn-to-speak-at-opportunitys-fall-microfinance-conference-in-washington-d-c/Sheryl WuDunn[/intlink], high-ranking official in the State Department María Otero, Nobel Peace Prize nominee Tony Hall, acclaimed writer http://www.opportunity.org/roger-thurow-enough/Roger Thurow[/intlink], and many more. But I’m also excited to meet other globally-minded individuals interested in http://www.opportunity.org/what-is-microfinance/microfinance[/intlink], and attend http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/breakout-sessions/breakout sessions[/intlink] on a number of technical topics related to philanthropy, poverty, political advocacy, and fields of microfinance.

Here now are just 3 of the many breakout sessions that I’m excited to attend:

1. Innovations in Technology
   We are working on so many exciting http://www.opportunity.org/blog/update-innovations-in-technology/technological innovations[/intlink] to help make it easier and more efficient to bring financial access to our clients, including sustainable electrical and power solutions, biometric smart cards, and cell phone banking technology. Meet session leader and expert, Daryl Skoog, Opportunity’s senior VP of technology.
2. Agricultural Finance: Reaching More of Africa
   Sixty-five percent of the sub-Saharan African labor force is employed in agriculture, yet the region’s agricultural sector receives just four percent of official development assistance. This breakout session, led by http://www.opportunity.org/blog/john-magnay-on-food-security-in-africa-and-agricultural-finance/John Magnay[/intlink], our senior agricultural advisor, will explain how we’re extending financial access to our most geographically remote clients on the continent.
3. Education Finance: Schools for Children Living in Poverty
   Through the Banking on Education initiative, we’ve disbursed over 450 loans to educational entrepreneurs building schools in underserved communities in Ghana, Malawi, Uganda and the Dominican Republic. Plus, we partner with the http://www.opportunity.org/blog/irene-pritzker-idp-foundation-honored-with-global-philanthropy-award/IDP Rising Schools Program[/intlink], pioneering a sustainable education model in support of extremely undeveloped schools in rural Ghana. Learn more about expanding educational opportunities through microfinance.

For more about our http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/speakers/speakers[/intlink], our http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/breakout-sessions/breakout sessions[/intlink] and the http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/agenda/agenda[/intlink] for the weekend, visit the http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/Fall Microfinance Conference page[/intlink] on our website. http://www.opportunity.org/opportunity-international-conference/opportunity-international-conference-register-now/Click here[/intlink] to register for the conference. Do not miss the chance to be a part of this exciting event.

REGISTER NOW

Watch the video “Harvesting Hope,” and attend the conference breakout session with sr. agricultural advisor John Magnay: