Kashf Foundation – Financial Services for All

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Osama A.

Osama runs a Social Media Marketing Agency and a Software Product Company. He has been involved in building online communities since 1997 and his major strengths are understanding how people choose to come together and work as strong cohesive units that believe in brands or causes. His team's flagship product offers highly innovative ways to get professional teams to work better together - resulting in significantly saved time in common tasks around getting people on the same page; and also resulting in a greater sense of trust among virtual teammates. You may contact him at hashmi@cdfsoftware.com with inquiries.

This is by no means a startup now but it was great to see this social entrepreneurship case study spanning over a decade. The Kashf Foundation is a microlending institution that works on a similar path to the Grameen Bank.

This is a commercial entity, in that they secure credit and loan facilities from all the larger banks in Pakistan (US$36 Million thus far) and give loans to the lowest-income segments in underprivileged areas in a way that enables people – particularly women in those communities – to improve their standards of living. Grameen’s founder calls this Business that also helps society as an imperative.

So far they claim to have disbursed over US$183 Million over the past 10 years and supported over 300,000 clients. The venture was founded by Roshneh Zafar, and has indeed come a long way.

Kudos!

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4 additional thoughts for this post.

farzal Said:
April 9th, 2008 at 11:06 am
KASHF is also a very progressive MF institute in terms of using technology to reduce their OpEx.
Ahmad Said:
April 9th, 2008 at 12:21 pm
Kashf borrows money from commercial banks at standard bank interest rates and then segments and loans that money anywhere from Rs. 20,000 to 200,000 at a whopping 20%+ APR to people whom it deems “credit worthy” mostly shop keepers and small time manufacturers.

The point is they do not create any jobs, nor do they loan money to poor people to create new enterpises, they only invest in running businesses with balance sheets and real income. Its more like a walmart of loansharks operating under the cover of the dream called “microfinance”.

p.s the other mf banks in pakistan are no better if not worse.
Humna Said:
April 30th, 2008 at 4:12 am
Hi,

Kashf is indeed going a great job, they have a lot of talented employees from lums and other top universities working for them. Ahmad MF institutions are not perfect and never will be, but they do create jobs by helping poor businesses hire new people and expand more quickly. I hope this will help reduce poverty in Pakistan.

Humna
Abdul Hannan Said:
July 6th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Kahf organization is doing a very nice job in thr feild of Micro Finance and it is a very rapid growing organization, I think it is the best and easy to reach source for those persons who are very poor or for those persons who even can not afford the one time food. I hope it will progress and continue to help the helpless persons I wish it all the best.