Building Sustainable Institutions: A Comparison of Four Microfinance Institutions in Rural Philippines

The Learning, Innovations and Knowledge Systems (LINKS) Center of Catholic Relief Services (CRS) is the regional microfinance support unit for Southeast Asia. LINKS functions as a resource center for the latest knowledge on microfinance and aims to share this knowledge among the 25 partner MFIs (19 of which are in the Philippines) by facilitating organizational assessments, developing training modules, and convening partner workshops to explore the issues of sustainability and rural expansion further using four CRS affiliates as case studies. The objective of the workshop was to document the current microfinance practices of the four MFIs; Identify unique and innovative approaches developed by the institutions; and explore the implications of an MFI expansion into agricultural or rural microfinance and potential problems or issues that might arise.