ECONOMICREFORM

Feature Service
March 31, 2011

Center for International Private Enterprise

Corporate Governance, Scale, and Financial Inclusion

Oscar Abello Program Coordinator, Global Programs, CIPE

Article at a glance
An estimated three billion people around the world have limited or no access to formal financial services. Such financial alienation leads to social and political alienation, which undermines democratic development. In order to be effective in improving access to finance for the poor, microfinance institutions (MFIs) must better manage key risks they face, including client credit risk, industry reputation, competition, and governance. Better corporate governance can make the operations of MFIs both profit and non-profit more sustainable and more scalable, and have a multiplier effect of increasing transparency and inclusiveness beyond the financial sector.

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Center for International Private Enterprise

Corporate Governance, Scale, and Financial Inclusion

Introduction
After having their first child together, Hamid and Khadeja had to move away from their coastal village to find work. Settling in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, Hamid eventually found work as a backup driver for a motorized rickshaw and Khadeja did occasional sewing work from home. Although they earned about $70 a month, money never flowed steadily. The couple had to find ways to bridge the good weeks and the bad. Portfolios of the Poor: How the Worlds Poor Live on $2 a Day1, released in April 2009, offers a detailed portrait of households like Hamid and Khadejas. Working in South Africa, India, and Bangladesh, teams of trained researchers interviewed over 250 households at 15-day intervals for about a year each. They attempted to record every financial transaction that each household was willing to disclose not many at first, but after enough visits the authors found they could gain enough trust to obtain a more complete account of the household cash flow. In Hamid and Khadejas case, they earned about $840 in a year, put $451 into savings or insurance and took $514 from savings, loans, and other instruments, for a cash transaction turnover of $965. Hamid and Khadeja handled more money in a year than they earned, just like many other poor households. At the end of the year, their balance sheet contained assets and liabilities across six different financial instruments nearly all of them outside of the formal financial sector. Hamid and Khadeja are just two of the estimated three billion people who have limited or no access to formal financial services.2 Theirs is the life shared by almost half of humanity, with no savings accounts, checking accounts, bank loans, debit cards, credit cards, formal insurance, or other basic financial services taken for granted in developed economies. Portfolios of the Poor is just one recent illustration that even though many countries formal financial sectors ignore the poor, the poor

do not ignore finance. While there are personal and cultural reasons why the poor may retain some of their informal financial instruments, there is also demand for the safety and reliability of formal financial services. A growing variety of organizations, tools, and business models have emerged to provide access to formal finance for the poor. New models like correspondent or branchless banking that take advantage of mobile technology are reducing transactions costs for banks and bank customers. Such models typically involve contracting or franchising existing small retailers as agents to collect deposits or disburse withdrawals from bank accounts processed via cell phone.3 Yet success remains an exception to the rule; in most low-income and many middle-income countries, formal financial sectors remain reluctant to seek new markets. Such financial alienation leads to social and political alienation, which undermines the growth of democratic values and institutions. Even the most liberal democratic governments can be held hostage by an oligarchic financial sector that serves only a powerful elite.

The Problem
Over the past three decades, microfinance has stirred the imagination of many and spurred discussions about the role of finance in alleviating poverty. At first limited to tiny collateral-free loans for the purpose of starting or running a business, many microfinance institutions (MFIs) have since diversified to provide savings or insurance in response to client needs. As of December 2009, the 1,395 MFIs that reported their information to the Microfinance Information Exchange (MIX), the leading business information provider dedicated to strengthening transparency in the microfinance sector, counted 86.2 million borrowers and 95.8 million voluntary savers worldwide4 still far from reaching the three billion unbanked.
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The Benefits of Financial Inclusion for Democracy

Changing perceptions of the financial sector.
Populist leaders frequently cite banks alleged greed and disregard for the average citizen as justification to grab power for themselves. Opening a formal bank account represents a new and important tie to the formal economy for the account holder. businesses. Lack of financing and credit often holds back small and medium-sized enterprises from scaling up to create jobs and opportunities that democracies need for political stability and tax revenue.

Tackling the economic informality issue.

Access to local capital for small and growing

Whether they are nonprofit or commercial, MFIs face many strategic choices as they grow and evolve new models to adopt, new technologies to implement, staff to hire, new services to provide, codes of ethics and risk management strategies to adopt, to list a few. How choices get made and who gets to be involved in strategic decisionmaking can vary tremendously across MFIs, and what is on paper, if anything, may not reflect the MFIs strategic decision-making reality. When a single voice often the MFI founder dominates decision-making, that is a telltale sign of weak corporate governance. Separating ownership and management roles paves the way for scale and sustainability. Internally, when effective board members set and enforce incentives according to clear social or financial goals, professional staff can grow to enormous numbers with much lower risk of mission drift. Externally, strong corporate governance is a major draw to investors, depositors, and donors who seek fair treatment and safe harbor for funds. It is already common for poor households to distrust formal financial institutions. Strengthening corporate governance of MFIs is part of cultivating new faith in financial sectors that is crucial to undermining perceptions that banks are only for the rich and powerful elite. When corporate governance is neglected, the consequences can be dire, as happened recently in Indias Andhra Pradesh.

Greater transparency across all sectors.

Financial inclusion for the poor and for SMEs will not be achieved without transparency and accountability within the financial sector, which then demands the same from other sectors as well as government.

While there are many individual success stories associated with microfinance, these stories remain niche-market oases in a financial desert. Greater scale is necessary for formal financial sectors to reach the three billion unbanked, and sectoral change as a goal eschews any notion that the poor should keep to separate but equal microfinance institutions while everyone else has access to banks. Improvements in property rights, contract enforcement, bankruptcy reform, central banks, and regulations among other institutions will enable financial sectors to reach the poor, but the emergence and growth of financial service models that can reach the poor in current conditions present an urgent corporate governance challenge. Weak corporate governance leads to financial sector ruin even in places where institutions are strong. Where institutions are underdeveloped at best, and corrupt at worst, there is even more pressure on MFI board members to enforce ethical practices, establish lending discipline, and create a culture of risk awareness among management and staff.
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The Crisis
In 2005, there were an estimated one million microloans outstanding in Indias Andhra Pradesh state; by 2010 that number skyrocketed to an estimated 25-27 million microloans outstanding, valued at about $4 billion. Such growth came about primarily through private investment. SKS Microfinance, Indias largest microlender, for example has about a quarter of its loan portfolio in Andhra Pradesh. SKS made headlines in July 2010 when it issued Indias first microfinance initial public offering that attracted major attention from investors as well as critics.5

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Corporate Governance, Scale, and Financial Inclusion

The Benefits of Corporate Governance for MFIs

Accountability. Nothing reinforces ethical
practices and risk management better than having to regularly speak and report on them to people outside of daily MFI operations. angle lens on MFI operations, helping executives or managers discuss and adopt new ideas or technologies as appropriate to the MFI mission. that already have governance procedures in place that will facilitate scaling up without scaling recklessly. their own, become full-fledged banks, or merge with a larger commercial bank, the services they provide cannot be at risk just because the founding executive or manager has left.

repayments. Suddenly deprived of major cash flows, Indian microlenders faced collapse when time came to pay their own creditors. Many questions about Andhra Pradeshs microfinance crisis remain unanswered. At the Center for Global Development in December 2010, Indias leading economic journalist, Swaminathan Aiyar told an audience that if one thing is clear it is that strong corporate governance is absolutely necessary to the future growth and success of microfinance.7 The rest of the nascent global microfinance industry has taken notice.

Flexibility. Board members serve as a wide-

Scalability. Investors are attracted to firms

The Banana Skins

For a third year, the Center for the Study of Financial Innovation has surveyed microfinance practitioners, investors, analysts, regulators, and other microfinance experts to compile its annual Microfinance Banana Skins report on the top risks facing the microfinance industry worldwide. Many Banana Skins survey respondents are in the nonprofit space, demonstrating the awareness that corporate governance is not just a concern for commercial MFIs. The 2011 Banana Skins report,8 released in February 2011, reflects the results of a survey conducted in November and December 2010 among 533 respondents from 86 countries and multinational institutions. The respondents were asked to describe their main concerns about the microfinance sector over the next 2-3 years, rate a list of potential risks or Banana Skins and evaluate the preparedness of microfinance institutions to handle these risks. Based on their answers, the report ranked corporate governance the fourth highest risk both by itself and as an issue deeply embedded in each of the top three risks cited: client credit risk, industry reputation, and competition. Credit risk Client credit risk is linked to the notion of overindebtedness microfinance clients taking on more loans than they have the capacity to repay. The easy
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Sustainability. Whether MFIs grow larger on

National policy also drove capital into microfinance through the Priority Sector Lending Act that directed 40 percent of domestic lending (and 32 percent of incoming foreign lending) into 14 priority sectors, including microfinance. Furthermore, it is illegal in India for MFIs to take deposits, so debt, equity, or donations are the only sources of capital for MFIs. When stories began circulating in reputable media about clients committing suicide due to an inability to repay their loans, the question of whether MFIs in Andhra Pradesh maintain lending discipline and enforce ethical conduct came suddenly into the limelight.6 In a period of such rapid growth, had the profit motive driven microlenders too far and too quickly into consumer lending rather than microenterprise lending? Did agents fully disclose interest rates to clients? What prompted loan officers to use public shaming and intimidation in collecting repayments? Was every MFI guilty of such malpractice? The state government in Andhra Pradesh responded to such questions by issuing a decree to freeze all microlending and to cease all microloan

Corporate Governance, Scale, and Financial Inclusion

Center for International Private Enterprise

solution to over-indebtedness is establishing credit bureaus or some functional equivalent; yet of course institution building on that scale is never easy. India, the worlds most populous democracy, is only just beginning to create a national identification system that would, among other things, enable the emergence of credit scores for individuals. Indian microfinance networks and associations are major supporters of Indias national identification system. In the meantime, weakness of internal controls remains a major issue for MFIs. Pressure to extend loans out of kindness or to meet quarterly portfolio targets are tremendous temptations to circumvent checks and balances in the loan approval process assuming checks and balances exist at all. Checks and balances are a key area of concern in corporate governance, as is establishing an internal culture of the highest respect for them. Even with a credit bureau system in place, such an internal culture is crucial just ask mortgage lenders in the United States. Industry reputation Reputation risk revolves around the great debate between advocates of nonprofit, missiondriven MFIs versus for-profit, commercial MFIs. The events in Andhra Pradesh are the most recent and perhaps the most heated chapter in the story so far. On one side, advocates and practitioners of nonprofit, mission-driven microfinance insist that it is the only way to safely and respectfully extend credit to the poor. Commercial MFIs, in their view, are prone to raising interest rates to usurious levels, and extending credit for credits sake, turning them into the unscrupulous moneylenders they were supposed to eliminate. Being mission-driven is vital to maintaining lending discipline, enforcing ethical collection practices, and keeping interest rates down. Nonprofit MFIs are not necessarily opposed to leveraging private capital as microcredit, but they are adamantly opposed to allowing private investors interests to dominate client interests.
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On the other side, commercial MFIs insist that theirs is the only feasible way to reach the three billion unbanked. Competitively attracting commercial capital to leverage as microcredit allows for a whole world of potential investors to underwrite financial inclusion. When it comes to diversifying beyond microcredit, which a growing number of MFIs have identified as a priority, transforming from nonprofit to for-profit is sometimes the only way to legally offer savings, insurance, or larger loans sought by established clients with growing businesses. ACCION Internationals Center for Financial Inclusion (CFI), a multi-faceted initiative to advance commercial microfinance while upholding the interests and needs of clients worldwide, has a treasure trove of case studies where nonprofit MFIs have become for-profit or established forprofit affiliates to diversify services or scale up.9 CFI also serves as the secretariat for the Council of Microfinance Equity Funds (CMEF), a group of more than 20 leading private funds that invest in MFIs. In 2005, partly in response to the growth of commercial finance, CMEF released a consensus statement on The Practice of Corporate Governance in Shareholder-Owned Microfinance Institutions outlining the key structures and procedures of sound MFI governance.10 Unfortunately, as CFIs managing director Beth Rhyne told the same audience that heard Swaminathan Aiyar in December, the commitment to corporate governance among MFIs has been taken up in letter but not enough in spirit, leaving the industry open to criticism for managing capital irresponsibly and exposing the poor to new-age moneylenders backed by global investors. Competition Banana Skins respondents cited competitive pressure as one of the prime causes of irresponsible lending and over-indebtedness. The difficulty of finding new clients and managing larger client loads nudges loan officers toward circulating more and more loans among established clients rather than growing clientele. Other respondents cited the need to repay their own creditors as a prime

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Corporate Governance, Scale, and Financial Inclusion

reason why collection agents resort to intimidation and public shame tactics. Competition is not going to go away. Donors and specialized MFI investors remain keen on pushing microfinance as a poverty relief approach that entails more than just pure handouts. Banana Skins respondents noted downscaling by large banks into the microfinance market as further competitive pressure, fueled by correspondent banking models and branchless banking. MFIs will certainly be competing for continued donations, debt, or equity for microfinance as it becomes available, and there is nothing to stop current MFIs from pursuing some of that downscaling investment by merging with or becoming contracted as banking agents to large commercial banks. MFIs will have to choose between joining with competitors, attracting donations or investment to scale up, or folding entirely. Will board members and staff be prepared to have those discussions? Corporate governance In 2010, MIX reported that MFI clients and depositors have been growing about 20 percent a year worldwide11 with $65 billion in loans outstanding and a total deposit value of about $30 billion. That kind of growth, particularly on the depositor side, makes corporate governance a major factor in attracting or deterring new depositors, investors, or donors. The poor, as noted above, do indeed have some sophistication when it comes to money and finance, and they are risk-averse when it comes to where they store their money. It can take years to build up trust in the community for people to begin leaving their hard-earned money with an MFI agent. Whether an MFI exhibits fairness, accountability, responsibility, and transparency the core values of strong corporate governance in decision-making and daily operations will be crucial to future growth and resilience.

Fonkoze, Haitis largest MFI, uses a heterodox client-member model of corporate governance that was crucial in maintaining lending discipline while innovating in response to client needs in the aftermath of the tremendous and tragic January 2010 earthquake. Fonkoze has both for-profit and nonprofit arms registered in Haiti, yet they are governed in practice as a single body under one corporate governance structure. Involving clients many of them also depositors as a wide-angle lens on its operations is key to Fonkozes resilience and ability to adapt and evolve even in the immediate months following the earthquake.12 Fonkozes individual branch operations formally incorporate client input into loan assessment and even microinsurance claim settlement. Regional caucuses of Fonkoze clients provide feedback to branch managers and elect delegates to Fonkozes national assembly, considered the highest policymaking body in the organization. While Fonkozes clients may not have studied abstract financial concepts, examples from Portfolios of the Poor demonstrate that the poor do know how to manage money and have plenty to say about how microfinance branch managers should conduct business. The culture of corporate governance at Fonkoze is strong enough that the institution is able to serve as a reliable and transparent conduit for millions of dollars in additional post-earthquake grants and aid flows as an alternative to government channels.13 Fonkoze is an example of an MFI taking corporate governance seriously and a powerful illustration of how strong corporate governance allows an MFI to withstand an earthquake, whether geophysical or financial.

The Challenge
As investors and donors demand stronger corporate governance among MFIs, will that pressure be met with just more promises, or meaningful institutional strengthening?

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Center for International Private Enterprise

Examples of Organizations Working on Corporate Governance Issues

the Association of Development Finance Institutions in Asia and the Pacific have conducted conferences, built a Corporate Governance Rating System for Development Banks & Other Institutions, and publish a Governance Newsletter and website with more resources devoted to corporate governance for development finance institutions, governance-asia.com. Kosovo: Riinvest Institute, a think tank, released studies on corporate governance of banks, insurance companies, and stateowned enterprises as part of promoting and strengthening accountability and transparency in a post-conflict area. Philippines: The Institute for Corporate Directors (ICD) annually ranks publicly listed Filipino companies based on a corporate governance scorecard. In the last round of scoring, ICD introduced separate scorecards for banks and insurance companies. Recently, ICD scorecards have become a requirement for all publicly listed companies on the Philippines Stock Exchange. Thailand: The Thai Institute of Directors (IOD) is serving as the backbone organization in a collective action initiative to fight corruption in Thailand, and has 27 large and small companies as signatories to its anticorruption pledge. Corruption is a symptom of weak corporate governance, which is why IOD also trains directors in strengthening the governance of their boards. Tunisia: LInstitut Arabe des Chefs dEntreprises (IACE) has developed corporate governance guidelines for Tunisia and launched the Center for Corporate Governance in 2009 to fulfill the need for expertise and training in the implementation of good corporate governance. Turkey: The Corporate Governance Association of Turkey (TKYD) has produced corporate governance guides for familyowned companies and football teams, publishes a corporate governance magazine, and gathers feedback from Turkeys private sector to comment and make recommendations on corporate governance legislation.

Beyond any individual greed or misconduct by managers or board members, institutional weaknesses in the corporate governance environment can undermine even the most wellmeaning MFI. Board members or advisors need institutions and resources that enable healthy discussions with managers and staff about topics like lending discipline, client over-indebtedness, ethical lending and collection practices, and the overall MFI strategy for the future. Staff members need support and education about how corporate governance helps them perform better. Such discussions were either missing or superficial in the rapid growth years preceding the Andhra Pradesh microfinance crisis. As microfinance continues to grow, both in numbers and in services provided, those discussions will determine whether growth will lead to more crises, or to healthy, resilient, and inclusive financial sectors. For board members or staff, as in any adaptive problem that requires behavioral change and new incentives, improving corporate governance among MFIs requires supporting organizations and networks. The Global Corporate Governance Forum (GCGF), a division of the International Finance Corporation, focuses on building and improving professional associations of board members as key to strengthening institutions for corporate governance. CIPE has also worked on corporate governance with a number of national-level institutes of directors, some of them affiliated with GCGF, in addition to professional accounts associations and other organizations. Organizations and networks provide regular forums for board members or staff to share useful practices, learn from each others mistakes, and to hold each other accountable for standards of professional-quality corporate governance. Further education among MFI board members and staff about corporate governance must take place in the context of improving the overall corporate governance environment for microfinance. Depending on the country, MFIs
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Corporate Governance, Scale, and Financial Inclusion

and MFI board members may seek closer ties to existing professional corporate governance support organizations or establish their own. Either way, no single training manual or workshop can ensure that industry-wide corporate governance evolves and adapts to a constantly changing environment. That is the role of dispersed professional networks and organizations.

The Big Picture

Strengthening corporate governance of MFIs is not a panacea for increasing access to finance for the poor. New models, new technologies, and better institutions are key pieces to the puzzle. Nonetheless, corporate governance is crucial for piecing the puzzle together. Going forward, better corporate governance at MFIs will only become more important due to the growing movement towards savings-led microfinance and microinsurance, where deposits or premiums from the poor themselves are leveraged as microcredit or even larger investments turning MFIs into real financial intermediaries. With the sustainable and meaningful inclusion that effective corporate governance facilitates, MFIs can aggregate larger pools of savings or even insurance premiums that can be leveraged to solve another access to finance problem: the lack of investment flowing to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the missing middle, in need of more capital than a typical microloan yet still far below current thresholds for commercial bank loans. They may never become Goldman Sachs, but by pooling the surprisingly deep resources of the poor MFIs could help bring low-cost, lowrisk, local capital to SMEs - the real engines of job growth and innovation in any economy. As MFIs that achieve that kind of scale they would also spark competition. Many emerging market financial sectors are dominated by a few large state-owned or recently privatized banks whose interest in more competitive, inclusive financial sectors varies widely. They have always had state

accounts, corporate accounts, currency exchanges, large wire transfers for multinational trade, and other large clients or transactions for which they can charge exorbitant fees, and have grown used to making safe bets on government debt rather than riskier SME financing. These banks have never felt pushed to provide basic, accessible financial services for the poor or to finance SMEs. Growing MFIs could provide that push. Certainly a few large banks will take on the challenge and join a rules-based, democratic race to profit by serving the poor or financing SMEs. Others may not welcome competition, spelling different fortunes entirely for financial inclusion. Whether MFIs grow into real financial intermediaries on their own or they merge with larger commercial banks, financial inclusion is the ultimate goal. For those countries where financial inclusion gradually becomes the norm, the benefits of course will ripple far beyond the financial sector. Banks gain customers, small businesses gain access to capital, and people gain jobs. Democracies that deliver financial inclusion gain stakeholders, local sources of financial professionals, and even local sources of borrowing for municipal infrastructure projects. More transparent and inclusive financial sectors are also prone to increasing transparency across the rest of the economy, as bankers impose greater financial disclosure requirements on the firms and governments they finance. Ever since the emergence of agriculture required households to find ways to manage their income between one harvest and the next, finance has been a crucial fulcrum in the human story. Todays MFIs may tip the balance toward greater financial, political, and social inclusion. Whether they do or they simply fade away as another global development movement gone awry, is a question of corporate governance.

Corporate Governance, Scale, and Financial Inclusion

Center for International Private Enterprise

Endnotes
1

Daryl Collins, Jonathan Morduch, Stuart Rutherford, Orlanda Ruthven, Portfolios of the Poor: How the Worlds Poor Live on $2 a Day, Princeton University Press, 2009. 2 Banking for Billions report (in conjunction with the Economist Intelligence Unit), June, 2010, http://www. newsroom.barclays.com/Media-Library/Banking-forBillions-report-165f.aspx. 3 For more on new correspondent banking models: Chaia, Alberto, Robert Schiff and Esteban Silva. A new idea in banking for the poor. McKinsey Quarterly. November 2010. http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/A_new_idea_ in_banking_for_the_poor_2703 4 Microfinance at a Glance 2008. Updated December 31, 2009. Prepared by Adrian Gonzalez. Accessed on March 17, 2011. http://www.themix.org/publications/ mix-microfinance-world/2009/12/microfinance-glance 5 SKS Microfinance IPO sees strong demand, Reuters, August 2, 2010, http://in.reuters.com/ article/2010/08/02/idINIndia-50571220100802. 6 Eric Bellman and Arlene Chang, Indias Major Crisis in Microlending, The Wall Street Journal, October 28, 2010, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702 304316404575580663294846100.html. 7 The Global Implications of Indias Microcredit Crisis (Event Video), Center for Global Development, December 9, 2010, http://www.cgdev.org/content/ multimedia/detail/1424664/. 8 Microfinance Banana Skins 2011, The CSFI survey of microfinance risk, February, 2011, http://www.cgap. org/gm/document-1.9.49643/Microfinance_Banana_ Skins_2011.pdf. 9 Center for Financial Inclusion at ACCION International, http://resources.centerforfinancialinclusion.org/ publications/Aligning_I_240.asp. 10 The Practice of Corporate Governance in Shareholder Owned Microfinance Institutions, Consensus Statement of the Council of Microfinance Equity Funds, Council of Microfinance Equity Funds, May 2005, http://www. accion.org/Document.Doc?id=571. 11 Banana Skins report, p. 5. 12 Oscar Abello, In Haiti, the Fonkoze Model of Social Evolution, January 26, 2010, http://www.nextbillion. net/blog/2011/01/26/in-haiti-the-fonkoze-model-ofsocial-evolution-part-2. 13 Accounting for Fonkozes Earthquake Funding, A Special Brief on Fonkozes Earthquake Response, January 2011, http://www.fonkoze.org/docs/Accountability_Fonkoze_ Final.pdf.

Oscar Abello is the Program Coordinator for Global Programs at the Center for International Private Enterprise, where he coordinates social media for CIPE and works on projects strengthening economic journalism, business associations, corporate citizenship, and entrepreneurship. On a volunteer basis, he is also a staff writer for Nextbillion.net, a leading blog and clearinghouse for development through enterprise. He holds a B.A. in Economics from Villanova University. The views expressed by the author are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE). CIPE grants permission to reprint, translate, and/or publish original articles from its Economic Reform Feature Service provided that (1) proper attribution is given to the original author and to CIPE and (2) CIPE is notified where the article is placed and a copy is provided to CIPEs Washington office. The Economic Reform Feature Service is CIPEs online and electronic article distribution service. It provides in-depth articles designed for a network of policymakers, business leaders, civic reformers, scholars, and others interested in the issues relating to economic reform and its connection to democratic development. Articles are e-mailed and posted online twice a month. If you would like to subscribe free of charge, please join the CIPE network by entering your e-mail at www.cipe.org. CIPE welcomes articles submitted by readers. Most articles run between 3-7 pages (1,0003,000 words). All submissions relevant to CIPEs mission will be considered based on merit. The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE) strengthens democracy around the globe through private enterprise and market-oriented reform. CIPE is one of the four core institutes of the National Endowment for Democracy. Since 1983, CIPE has worked with business leaders, policymakers, and journalists to build the civic institutions vital to a democratic society. CIPEs key program areas include anti-corruption, advocacy, business associations, corporate governance, democratic governance, access to information, the informal sector and property rights, and women and youth.