February 1, 2007

ACDI/VOCA Programming Mentioned in VEGA Publication

The Volunteers for Economic Growth Alliance (VEGA) highlighted ACDI/VOCA-Azerbaijan’s enterprise development work in its Feb. 2007 newsletter. Two volunteers from the MBA Enterprise Corps were trained by the VEGA implementing partner Citizens Development Corps for their 13-15 month assignments to work on ACDI/VOCA’s Small and Microenterprise Support Through Financial Sector Development Project in Azerbaijan. Jerrold Smelcher (Thunderbird) and Barbara Yale (Univ. of South Carolina) will assist the ACDI/VOCA project to develop the non-oil sector of the Azeri economy by helping to create an enabling environment that increases small and medium-sized enterprises’ access to microloans and other financial services.

The ACDI/VOCA volunteers will focus on:

• upgrading training services to increase the number of trained and competent financial managers to support the training activities of the Azerbaijan Bank Training Center and help connect them with international certification bodies or educational institutions
• increasing the Azerbaijan Micro-Finance Association’s (AMFA) capacity to serve as a training, service and advocacy organization to support the development of non-bank financial institutions to serve SME clients