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After receiving his degree in finance at WSU in 2002,
many paths beckoned to Brooke Randall. Some paths
might have led him to glamorous emerging high-tech
companies or to powerhouse global leaders like Microsoft or
Boeing. Others might have led him to international finance
companies, Wall Street, or even the World Bank.
But Randall chose the unconventional road, one that
recently led him to the slums of Kenya. It likely will take
him soon to remote rural villages in India or crowded
barrios in Mexico.
Randall is an analyst at Unitus, a Redmond, Washington,
and Bangalore, India, nonprofit that is attempting to alleviate
poverty by rapidly increasing access to microfinance.
Rather than simply using donated charitable funds to
finance tiny loans to people living in poverty around the
globe, as is the most common model at present, Unitus’
goal is to support selective microfinance growth, which
can be funded by the capital markets. Just like stocks or
bonds, microfinance institutions that make the actual loans
can draw on capital from Unitus, raised from investors.
The organization, founded in 2000 by former Microsoft
executive Mike Murray, uses a venture capital approach
to dramatically accelerate the growth of microfinance loan
institutions to get more financial services into the hands of
the people that need it.
“One of things we’re trying to do is push the industry,
move it away from being a donor-funded to a capital
industry,” Randall said. “We think it can operate profitably
without donor capital. We think they (the loaning
institutions) can grow much more quickly if they’re based
on being a for-profit regulated industry. We’re pushing our
partners to take on world-class business partners.”
Randall joined the company in November, after a stint at
Quellos, a local investment management company.
“I had an interest in international development and
was attracted to a nonprofit setting,” he said. “I wanted
to leverage some of my skill set within that. My father is a
minister, so that’s a bit of a motivation. I just thought it was
an interesting idea. As opposed to working for the World
Bank, I could join an innovative nonprofit, an interesting,
cutting-edge nonprofit.”
At its most basic, microfinance lends people living in
poverty loans so small that people living in industrialized
nations can hardly understand it: $50 to buy a water buffalo
that will give milk. Perhaps $75 to stock a small store,
or $50 to purchase chickens and equipment to produce
eggs. It is not charity; the borrowers must pay the money
back on an agreed-upon schedule. Repayment is usually
guaranteed because a group of borrowers, say women in a
rural village, are responsible for each other’s debts.
In most cases, the repayment levels exceed that of loans
in industrialized nations: 95 percent or better. The majority
of borrowers are impoverished women with little or no
education.
“We think by providing people with credit who use the
proceeds to start their own businesses, we provide a selfsustaining
mechanism, so an individual woman and others
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10 WSU College of Business