Regional Mentoring
An additional area of focus for Exchange is strengthening local and regional providers of technical services in Africa and Asia. Regional mentoring promotes sustainable technical assistance services for investees and other financial institutions on a more cost-effective basis. SCE focuses on piloting different capacity building methodologies and sharing lessons on how to deliver capacity building and business services effectively to financial institutions serving poor and underserved entrepreneurs. Skill building is accomplished through Exchange consultant-led training workshops, job shadowing opportunities, and other methods of knowledge transfer specifically designed for employees of the institution or regional consultants.
For information on previous Capacity Building projects, please view individual investee pages.
Explore Capacity Building
Name: Cecilia B. Dicdiquin
Country that you call home:
How long have you been a consultant? 7 Years
What are your key areas of expertise?
Development Banking, specifically the areas of:
- Credit
- Internal Controls
- Human Resources Management
What is the most recent (or current) project you have worked on for SCE?
- MIC Microfinance Bank in
What was the goal(s) of the consulting work you were helping to implement?
- To strengthen credit and control systems
- To improve delinquency management
- To build capacities of lenders and approvers of MIC
What were the key successes from the overall project? If current, name 3 areas of progress that you have seen during the project.
- Setting up and documenting the framework in controlling loan delinquency
- Making enhancements to the bank's business model in institutionalizing sound credit risk management principles
- Developing institutional appreciation of the need to establish good performance management system
If there is any additional information that you believe would be a good highlight, please share it with us.
One key observation that is common of the four Exchange partner institutions with which I have been involved is that at the time of my engagement these institutions all had serious issues with their IT systems—specifically on the loan management reports. These issues were mostly normal bugs in the system, an inherent part of systems implementation.
However, it was surprising to note that management had not developed a manual tracking system for at least portfolio growth and loan delinquency. Manual tracking should give top management reliable information on the status of the loan portfolio at the time when the IT system is still unstable. Little did they realize that it is at this crucial stage of IT implementation that fraudulent perpetrators could take advantage by manipulating information in the system, specifically when the levels of system access rights are not yet defined and or implemented.
Manual tracking is not easy but it is not impossible either, as I have visited one institution in
