Microenterprise Implementation Grant Program---Financial Services

The summary for the Microenterprise Implementation Grant Program---Financial Services grant is detailed below. This summary states who is eligible for the grant, how much grant money will be awarded, current and past deadlines, Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance (CFDA) numbers, and a sampling of similar government grants. Verify the accuracy of the data FederalGrants.com provides by visiting the webpage noted in the Link to Full Announcement section or by contacting the appropriate person listed as the Grant Announcement Contact. If any section is incomplete, please visit the website for the Agency for International Development, which is the U.S. government agency offering this grant.

Microenterprise Implementation Grant Program---Financial Services: USAID s Microenterprise Development Division is pleased to announce the Implementation Grant Program (IGP), Financial Services for FY2004. The authority for the RFA is found in the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as amended. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is committed to an economic growth strategy that emphasizes poor people's economic empowerment. Microenterprise development has been recognized around the world as an important means to this end. A key goal of USAID s microenterprise development strategy is to increase the ability of microenterprises to access high quality, competitively priced financial services. USAID supports the development of institutions that directly provide those financial services, and we try to help them attain large scale and fully sustainable operations through improvements in operational capacity, efficiency and service delivery techniques. Underlying the microenterprise development strategy is the Agency s operational hypothesis that financial services can be sustainably delivered to poor and underserved populations. The vision that guides this is the creation of vibrant financial services markets offering long-term access to a supply of sustainable, appropriate and affordable services that are sought by underserved populations (particularly women and the poor). The principal approaches of the Agency for achieving this vision are to augment outreach of individual financial service providers to underserved populations by increasing the scale and depth of their client base, and to capture lessons that can be applied by the industry as a whole. To qualify for funding via the IGP, financial service programs must demonstrate that they can translate a given level of USAID support into improved income-earning prospects and other tangible benefits for large and growing numbers of microentrepreneurs and their households. Moreover, they must achieve significant scale and depth of outreach on a financially and institutionally sustainable basis, with a declining reliance on support from USAID and other donors. Finally, they must contribute to the expansion of the financial services industry through the development of products, services, institutions and approaches that have the potential for replication on a significant scale. Please see the link below for the full announcement.