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Roshaneh Zafar is pioneering the development of a women-centered and
women-managed initiative that combines a micro-level lending and savings
operation with related training and support activities at the community
level. The formula is currently being tested and refined in two Pakistani
villages and is expected to serve as a model for similar undertakings in
other parts of the country.
Educated in the United States at Yale University and the Wharton School of
Business of the University of Pennsylvania, Roshaneh is well equipped with
the knowledge and skills that the Kashf Foundation venture requires.
Before embarking on the Kashf initiative, Roshaneh was one of the
co-founders of Bedari, Pakistan's first women's crisis intervention center,
which provides counseling and other services to women in Islamabad. She also
spent four years as a World Bank staff member in Islamabad, where she
deepened her understanding of the Pakistan economy and of the ingredients
required for successful efforts to help the country's most disadvantaged
people better their circumstances.
In 1995, Roshaneh left her World Bank post to start the Kashf Foundation. In
that still nascent undertaking, her efforts to develop a much-needed
micro-credit program were inspired, in part, by her contact with Muhammad
Yunus, the founder of the highly successful and now world-renowned Grameen
Bank in Bangladesh.
She founded the Kashf Foundation to spearhead the development of a new model
for a "full-service organization," managed by and for women, that combines
in-house, micro-scale banking and lending operations with closely integrated
training and support services.
The Foundation has obtained start-up funding
from outside sources and is now implementing, testing, and refining programs
with those characteristics in two pilot settings in rural Pakistan.
The Kashf Foundation was well received and has shown promising results for a
decade now. In a six-month period, Roshaneh and her colleagues have helped
village women organize, taken them through basic business training, and
coached them in basic literacy.
Roshaneh Zafar is convinced that micro-credit programs are an important tool
for offering new economic opportunities to poor women in rural settings. But
unlike many proponents of such programs, she is also persuaded that parallel
and closely linked training and support programs have a critically important
role to play in assuring the effective management of such schemes and the
success of the activities that they fund.
Roshaneh intends to play an active role in the dissemination process, both
as an advocate of the Kashf model and as a trainer of staff members of other
organizations seeking to launch similar initiatives. With that prospect in
view, she has already conducted several seminars on the Kashf approach in
which representatives of more than forty nongovernmental organizations from
various parts of the country have participated.
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