Conflux hits the road
Our roadshow was intended to showcase the functionalities of Mifos to MFIs in northern India. We chose to start with Utter Pradesh (North India state) because of its highly dense population plagued by gender inequality and poverty with more than 40% living below the poverty line. Most of the MFIs are lagging in adopting technology compared to their counterparts in South India.
Honestly speaking we did not have a proper travel plan. The contact number of a few MFIs in Utter Pradesh was our only hope; we decided to do the journey completely by train. | |
MissionOur mission for the roadshow was to educate MFIs on the following subjects:
|
|
All in all our roadshow, we traveled 6000KM by 6 different trains, meeting with 8 MFIs, resulting in one Mifos Cloud lead for Grameen Foundation and the request to deploy Mifos at 3 MFIs - Shakti Foundation, SEED Federation and Mahila Swayam Sahayak Sangh (SHG). The challenge was "Right Now Right Here" in 3 days we need to train all of them and configure Mifos for each institution, making sure they could feed all the old data into the new system. Some wanted to see how data in reports would look once data was entered, and asked if we could customize reports in a day or two. Here is how the journey unfolded. |
Day 1 to 5: Shikohabad
Day 1 at Shakti Foundation, Shikohabad
We gathered at SF head office to demo Mifos. Dilip Sevarthi, who leads SF, gave details about SF operations - they practice the Grameen methodology, operating over the the last 8 months with 38 JLGs with 5 members in each.
Next we did a brief talk about what is information, focusing on:
|
![]() |
![]() |
Later we started the detailed Mifos demo
|
At the end of presentation we had a Q & A session. Now I was waiting for MFIs response about Mifos. We were delighted by the response. Some notable responses included:
- This software is made as if for the MFI!! :)
- Can I learn and use this?
- If we do mistakes then how do we correct?
- And Shah Alam from SEED Federation was present, we want this software at SEED Fedeation also.
- And Dilip Sevarthi also runs SHG in Firozabad, said "Can we use this at SHG?"
Day 2 to 5 at Shakti Foundation
We started detailed training showing how Mifos goes hand in hand with MFI operations. With help of a pictorial user guide (the one we had prepared for RiSE) it was easy to explain. The next big thing was entering Old Data (around 8 months data!!) |
![]() |
![]() |
The operational staff of Shakti Foundation - Archanji (she used to maintain client/group and center details in book and cash book also) and Dilishan (loan officer) and Surajit (brand new data entry operator) - sat in a row. Along with Surajit, Vinay (Team member, Conflux technologies) sat as a mentor for data entry. They started entering the data and by end of day had finished around two months data entry! A great exercise to learn Mifos and get that data in. |
Finally we finished all the data entry, told how to take backup and also some DB backup using Dropbox.
A Mifos deployment complete in several days!
Dilip Sevarthi's Office (Seva Hut)
Day 6 at Firozabad
On Day 6, we journeyed to Firozabad. From the earliest it was famous for glass and bangle works; its related small scale industry is famous throughout the world. Due to underdeveloped industry, literacy rates are very low. The city suffers from child labour, low literacy, and pollution.
Firozabad is known as the world capital for beads. Glass beads produced here are exported to all over the world for use in all kinds of items including clothing, accessories, Jewellery and shoes.
We visited Swasahaya Mahila Mandal and did a demo Mifos. But SMM’s model slightly differs from normal MFI operations with a great stress on savings. Information flow in SMM is not real time, meaning collections sheets are submitted to the office a week or two after the transactions have taken place. This gap period creates a delay in gathering information at the head office. Finally to we took a decision to visit SMM again with some potential workarounds and custom reports – no deployment this roadshow.
Day 7 at Kanpur
Kanpur is the tenth most populous city in India and the largest within the state of Uttar Pradesh. It is the largest city of the Hindi-speaking belt after Delhi. It remains one of the oldest industrial townships of North India.
Already we had a plan in place! Of all the places to visit in Kanpur – we had made an appointment with Shramik Bharati.
Shramik Bharati is a Kanpur based NGO which work with both rural and urban communities. The areas where Shramik Bharati works are a plethora of diversity where on one end there are communities living in urban slums of Kanpur which once upon a time was known as Manchester of East. On the other end of the spectrum we have communities in rural areas of Kanpur which are characterized by large tracts of saline lands, ravine areas and also highly inaccessible pockets of extreme poverty. However the needs in their own manner of both these communities are the same.
We did a Mifos demo to Shrikanth (Shramik Bharati MIS manager), as already they were using a standalone MIS developed by a local IT company. At the end we took some data from their old MIS and entered into Mifos and showed, how data is organized, what kind of reports are available, and how easily data is searchable!
Vinay (Conflux team), Shrikanth (Shramik Bharati, MIS manager)
Day 8 at Lucknow
The Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust (RGCT)was established in 2002 to commemorate and take forward the vision of Rajiv Gandhi – India’s former Prime Minister – for the country. The Trust, a registered, non-profit institution, was set up by his wife Mrs Sonia Gandhi and their children, Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Vadra, to address areas of concern that were closest to Rajiv Gandhi’s heart. It aims to translate Rajiv Gandhi’s vision into action by implementing development programmes that have sustainable impact on these areas of concern. The Trust works in close collaboration with Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, a sister organisation and a think tank whose operations are aimed at influencing public policy, improving governance – local, national and international -- and providing enlarged opportunities to the underprivileged and the deprived. RGCT also has close links with the Sanjay Gandhi Memorial Trust (SGMT), a not for profit organisation which operates several development initiatives in Uttar Pradesh.
Before we talked with Mr. D. P. Singh, we thought RGMVP might have been a new MFI with around 1000 members. After talking with him, we realized there are around 350,000 community members in RGMVP and is almost 8 years old headed by P. Sampath Kumar (IAS). But I had a big question, if RGMVP liked Mifos application and asked how to provide services, did we have the bandwidth to provide service? Then we thought of Mifos Cloud team, we contacted Mr. Binny (Mifos Consultant GF India) and explained the situation. He was happy to partner with us and have demo at RGMVP.
Mr Panjak Jain, Ms Meenakshi Nag and Mr Chris Chalms from UK’s Department for International Development (DFID)
“This is not the end, its just the beginning of the Mifos Roadshow”
News Log
- Community Spotlight (12)
- ThoughtWorks HSP Team Invigorates Mifos X Community
- First Mifos Deployment in Latin America
- Hugo Technologies
- Outreach on the Ground - May 2012
- FINA and MFC launch Mifos in Laos
- SolDevelo
- Profamilia Goes Live with Mifos in Mozambique
- SolDevelo: Nimble Java Ninjas Fighting Poverty from Poland
- Conflux Mifos Roadshow
- Kongalend Deployment Kicks off in Namibia
- Mifos Specialist pushes forth in Mozambique
- Father and Daughter bring Mifos Technology to Senegal
- Company News (19)
- Global Launch of the Mifos Initiative - June 11 at Pivotal Labs
- Mifos at LinuxFest Northwest
- Mifos X on FLOSS Weekly
- Ready for New Heights at the FI2020 Global Forum
- Conservancy and COSM announce the Mifos Initiative
- 2013 Mifos Community Choice Awards - Honoring our Finest
- Take 3 = Triple the Impact
- Mifos Summit Day 2 Reflections
- 2013 Mifos Summit in Jaipur has Begun!
- How You Can Get Involved
- Remixing Microfinance
- OSCON's about to Kick Off!
- Mifos Transition Plan Finalized - Next Phase of Mifos Begins
- Grameen Foundation to Transition Mifos to Community-Led Effort
- Grameen Foundation Expanding Technology for Microfinance Initiative
- Scaling the Pyramid of IT Adoption
- Grameen Foundation and CGAP Host Tech Roundtable in Kenya - Advancing Back Office Systems for Microfinance
- Grameen Foundation and Microsoft Join Forces to Accelerate Impact of Technology for Microfinance
- Collectively Advancing Technology for the Industry with CGAP
- Mifos at ACCESS Microfinance India Summit
- Industry News (2)
- Open Source Community (36)
- A Light-hearted Look at our 2014 GSOC Interns
- Google Summer of Code 2014
- Meet the 2014 Google Summer of Code Class of Interns
- Volunteer with Mifos in 2014
- 2013 Mifos Summit Recap
- 2013 Mifos Graduating Class for Google Summer of Code
- 2013 Summit in Photos
- Optimizing UX for Mifos X
- A Team
- Google Summer of Code - We're Halfway Home
- Google Summer of Code 2013
- End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.
- Aligning Volunteer Passion with User Pain
- GSOC Mentor Summit 2010
- Building a Better Community Experience
- Enabling Social Change through Software Development
- Leila E Translations - The Final Push!
- User Meeting - a Big Success!
- Summer of Code 2010 - A Journey Well-Traveled
- Meet the 2010 Google Summer of Code Mifos Interns
- End Poverty. One Line of Code at a Time.
- Mifos FLOSS User Manual Sprint
- Uncovering the DNA of a Great Team
- Adam Feuer on the PayPal X Developer Network
- Mentors Meet in Mountain View, Manifest Mastery of Mentoring
- Widespread Reach of Open Source Community
- Building a Local Technology Ecosystem
- Product Announcements (22)
- COSM Ships Mifos X Platform 1.0
- mLite Demo on Mifos X
- Mifos 2.5 (Samiha J) Ships!
- Mifos 2.2.3 Released
- Mifos 2.4 is Live!
- Mifos X API
- Samiha J Release Announcement
- Mifos Android Client
- Mifos 2.6 - Esha K is Live
- Esha K Release Announcement
- Vinolia I Release Announcement
- Mifos X - The Next Generation
- Mifos 2.2.2 Ships
- Community Ships First Mifos Release Post-Transition
- Margaret H: Mifos 2.3 Ships!
- Margaret H Release Announced
- Mifos 2.1.6 Released & SolDevelo to Extend Mifos 2.2
- SunGard Releases Data Migration Toolkit
- Mifos 2.1.5 Released
- Mifos 2.0 and 2.1 - a Closer Look
- Mifos wants to Hear your Voice
- Mifos Earns High Ratings in CGAP Software Review
- Star Contributor (15)
- Technical Topics (1)