Kashf Foundation (Punjabi and ) is a non-profit organization, founded by Roshaneh Zafar in 1996. Kashf is regarded as the first microfinance institution (MFI) of Pakistan that uses village banking methodology in microcredit to alleviate poverty by providing affordable financial and non-financial services to low income households - particularly for women, to build their capacity and enhance their economic role. With headquarters in Lahore, Punjab, Kashf has regional offices in five major cities and over 200 branches across the Pakistan.
Recipient of many accolades, particularly in microfinance sector, it was awarded Microfinance Excellence Award by the Grameen Foundation and won the AGFUND Second International Prize for Microcredit, competing against 95 countries. In 2008, Kashf was ranked no. 34 among the Top 50 MFIs of the World by Forbes. In 2016, Kashf became the first MFI of Pakistan to win a European Microfinance Award for Microfinance and Access to Education.
History
Background
In 1993, Zafar, an Ashoka Fellow, was a Development economics student at Yale, where she came to know about the pioneer of microcredit and microfinance sector, Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank and abandoned her plans to become an investment banker. Despite this she joined World Bank in Islamabad in the Water supply and sanitation department, where she attended a meeting about women and children in Islamabad sponsored by UNICEF and met Dr. Yunus and briefly talked about this work. During her fieldwork trip to Tharparkar, she noticed that the desire of women's who wanted to work and generate income for their families. She decided to work for their sustainability and quit her job at World Bank and wrote to Dr. Yunus about her intentions, who flew her to Bangladesh where she spent ten-weeks at Grameen Foundation, attending workshops, sessions, trainings, visiting branches of Grameen Bank and studying their business model, and researching from the clients of foundation. Zafar traveled for a year touring Nepal and India understanding the structure of low-income households and was given $10,000 loan from Dr. Yunus to start her own organization. There with the help of Institut Européen d'Administration des Affaires (INSEAD) summer interns, she developed feasibility and business plan for women's businesses and female entrepreneurship in Pakistan.
Foundation
After an extensive preliminary work in 1995, Zafar registered, Kashf as a "research" based program in Lahore, in June 1996, with a total staff of five women, with Zafar working as a loan officer. It took six-month for the Foundation, before anyone would borrow the money and by November 1996 it had distributed 15 loans, all of whom were women, who also became associated with the Kashf. According to Roshaneh, it was a "trust building" period. After the initial rounding Kashf, started training women through numeracy training and made the process of loan easier. The first amount of loans given were 4,000 PKR (roughly $80).
The initial two years were spent in understanding the market and the needs of clients in peri-urban and urban settings. The importance of standardized products, systems and policies, the simplification of procedures and reporting requirements, along with the significance of focusing on client satisfaction and developing clear cut financial performance indicators was highlighted. The action research phase was followed by a more focused approach to manage growth in the years 1999 – 2001. The following years were focused on growth of organization, with the main aspect of this phase was to make the branch structure more lean and efficient; an aspect which was critical for ensuring the long term viability of the programme, along with setting up a cash flow model which would ensure the sustainability of a branch within a set time period. By early 2001, Kashf had a network of five branches in Lahore and a client base of 5,088 customers located in 214 centers. Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund, Department for International Development, and the Agha Khan Foundation provided core funding.