I just learned on Twitter  that today is Interdependence Day, the idea being that what one person does has an effect on the entire world.

I guess we really learned that lesson during the subprime crisis  and its aftermath, which is still wreaking havoc.

It is not surprising that, with the international banking community still traumatised, microcredit  is experiencing a revival.

Given its high repayment rates and social character, the microfinance industry is attracting a new influx of private capital with institutional investors transforming microcredit institutions, previously run like NGOs, into more formalised entities.

Good news for the poor and in particular for women?

Not so sure.

Women’s World Banking (WWB) has been studying this phenomenon and is warning the microfinance world against the dangers of the “mission drift” this transformation is causing.

WWB has discovered that the percentage of women clients served by formalised microfinance institutions tends to decline after their transformation.

In the fourth year after transformation, the average percentage of women borrowers usually drops from 77 to 60 per cent. This is due to lenders migrating from their original mission to serve low-income clients towards generating profits for their new shareholders and maintaining high-interest rates.

Women in the developing world, who are often illiterate and own no collateral, are the most vulnerable client group.

Microfinance  works. It provides communities with viable structures. The challenge of the coming years will be to make sure that it remains true to its roots. For multinationals operating in the developing world this challenge represents a unique opportunity to become involved in new type of initiative with the potential of ending poverty.

This is what Corporate Social Responsibility in the era of global interdependence is all about.

I am delighted to have been elected Second Vice President of TIAW, a global network of 50,000 that works for the economic empowerment of women.

One of the most important messages of our annual conference in Toronto was that we are entering “the age of the female economy”. According to Janet Riccio of Omnicom, “women will determine the success of products and even governments”. In the US, women own 40% of the businesses and employ 13 million people. In China, they control between 52 and 60% of all decisions made by households.

At the same time, we are experiencing an increasing “femininasation” of poverty.

Microcredit is going mainstream leaving women borrowers behind. They have already decreased from 80 to 60%. When microcredit organisations morph into microfinance institutions, the average size of their loans increases and the beneficiaries tend to become male.

Microcredit is reaching only 130 million families worldwide. A lot of work still needs to be done. I am very proud of TIAW’s microcredit program.

I have already blogged about Annette Verschuren’s great speech. Her leadership advice for the recession is “Don’t tell people what to do. Give them ownership. The more ownership, the closer to the customers”.

Social marketing is another hot topic in our times of crisis. Unilever’ Dove was the first brand to hand over its promotion to consumers through its much-publicised Evolution video posted on the internet. According to Ogilvy, it became the most frequently watched ad in the history of advertising.

Evolution’s message and Dove’s tradition of using real people for their ads have certainly left a mark. Recently, a department store in Montreal had to pull its catalogue after 200 customers complained about the emaciated look of its female models.

There is so much an organisation like TIAW can do to raise awareness of women’s role in the economy and society. I look forward to working with the new TIAW board.

I don’t do mornings.

It takes me a long time to get going in the morning. So I have a number of mantras I chant under the shower.

“I live an enchanted life” is one of them.

Last week I saw it come true during my trip to the US.

I had a series of enchanted moments that made my stay in California and Colorado very special and took away the stress of the past month.

One day, I entered my hotel room in Denver while the maid was cleaning it. The book on my night table, Three Cups of Tea, the incredibly moving story of Greg Mortenson’s work, caught her eye.

“What’s your name?” she asked and added “mine is Ida”.

There was this light in her eyes. Was it because we care about the same things?

The next morning, I was the only passenger on the shuttle bus back to the airport. The driver, Samuel from Ethiopia, bought me coffee and talked to me about spirituality.

And of course, I had a great time giving a presentation on Corporate Social Responsibility at IABC’s Southern Region conference.

I was delighted to see that CSR, a real passion of mine, is drawing so much interest. I am particularly happy that the people in my session were so interested in the case study I presented about Grameen and Danone.

Given how fond I am of Prof. Yunus, I can talk non-stop about Grameen.

At the end of my trip, I spent a couple of days in Napa with my friend’s daughter, Lana.

The day before I left we made a card for my mum and drew a rainbow on it.

And guess what…I woke up the next day, went outside and there it was…this enormous rainbow…the biggest Lana and I have ever seen.

I do live an enchanted life.

Sometimes one person is enough to turn a conference into the experience of a lifetime.

Widad Ibrahim grew up in Sudan on a farm owned by her grandmother.

She used to sell eggs at the side of the road. This is how she developed her business sense and how she got the idea to start selling apartments in Khartoum.

One business led to another and Widad now owns one of the largest industrial groups in Sudan with 800 employees. Her Bee Group includes gas stations, an oil company, an aviation business and a property development company.

I was sitting in a conference room at the World Bank with tears in my eyes. Something in that story sounded close to home. My grandmother, who used to manage a farm in post-war Italy, would have been very proud of Widad.

What an incredible story!

And there is more.

In 2002, Widad asked the male-only Businessmen Union in Khartoum to give her a room where women entrepreneurs could meet. In 2006, for the first time in the history of Sudan, a woman was elected to join the Union.

Widad visited Grameen Bank and got the idea to start the first micro-credit bank in Sudan. Her Family Bank, set up with other Sudanese business women, has more than 35 million US$ in its accounts.

During the train ride back to New York, I couldn’t shake Widad’s face from my mind. Her colourful hijab and the beautiful henna drawings on her hands and feet. Such an inspiring presence.

I am so fortunate to have heard her story. It is one that I will continue telling, again and again.

It was a story that sold microcredit to me.

I was working at a congress in Berlin years ago and Prof Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank, was our key-note speaker.

He told me a story about a woman Grameen had helped in Bangladesh. I was so moved. My mascara was running all over my face, but I just sat there and listened.

It was such a powerful story. I used it years later at a training session I was doing for a group of women in Bulgaria and they all had tears in their eyes.

I heard another inspiring microcredit story last week.

Naina Lal Kidwai, HSBC India’s chief executive, was speaking at the World Traders’ and shared a personal experience:

“I was at this typical village gathering [of women who receive microcredit] when a woman stood up and with great pride and confidence told us my ‘name is Rudiben. Until 5 years ago I was known as my husband’s wife and my son’s mother. Today I am known as Rudiben’”.

I was very pleased to learn that a main stream bank like HSBC is supporting microcredit. This wasn’t always the case when Prof. Yunus started off in the 1970s.

One of the women’s organisations I am involved in, TIAW, runs a series of successful microcredit programs.

And I was delighted to hear that our Prime Time Village bank program just raised US$ 42,000 at its February Gala in Singapore. Enough money to set up eight village banks in Asia!

Ramon Olle, CEO of Epson Europe, was on a trip to China. While visiting one of the company’s factories, he noticed that, in spite of the fact that the factory had no work at that moment, the workers were coming to the canteen every day to eat lunch.

“When you in Europe cancel your orders, our workers can’t eat so we have to keep the canteen open,” remarked someone.

That was the moment when rows of figures on elaborated spreadsheets turned into real destinies making Ramon realise just how interconnected we all are.

Ramon was speaking last night at an event organised by IABC Netherlands in Amsterdam.

He talked about the importance of values for corporate leaders and communicators.

Employees have to be perceived as human beings. “I believe that a person has both a material and a spiritual dimension, without limiting spirituality to faith or religion.”

Problems start when we try to solve problems with processes. “When employees come to the office in the morning, they bring with them all their personal desires and worries and those of their families. We cannot pretend these don’t exist. We have to look at people in their entirety.”

Ramon has been noticing that, although marketing efforts are more and more geared towards the individual (with personalised messages and e-mails), we keep treating employees as a bunch, forgetting the complexity of human beings.

“Good communication is one that focuses on messages that people want and need to hear. These have to be short, simple, crisp and transparent.”

If we send out a complicated message in a multicultural corporation, we risk confusion and misinterpretations because employees will use the ‘filters’ of their respective culture to decipher it.

This remark reminded me of something Professor Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank told me: we can present what we do in a simple way, one that is easy for others to understand, all the rest is a product of the ego. It is the ego that makes us believe that, if we create something complicated, it will look ‘good’ and people will think it is more valuable.

Ramon believes humility to be a core corporate value, one that should be promoted more strongly. How inspiring and refreshing!

Ramon is the author of ‘Engel bei der Arbeit - Führen mit Werten (Angels at the workplace - Leading with values) published in German by ATHENA. An updated version of the book is about to be published in German, Russian and Spanish.

Last night, I attended a talk by Professor Malcom Harper organised by City Women’ s Network on the topic of microfinance.

Microfinance was pioneered by Professor Muhammad Yunus during the 1974 famine in Bangladesh. Prof. Yunus started by lending $27 to a woman who made bamboo furniture. He then went on to establish Grameen Bank, which continued lending small sums of money to the poor and unemployed. In 2006, Yunus and Grameen won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Since the 1970s, Grameen has lent more than $5 billion to five million borrowers (more than 95% women).

Professor Harper, co-editor of the book “What is wrong with microfinance?”, is a staunch critic of a model that, he believes, drives poor people into debt. The problem, he says, is that microfinance starts from the debt end instead of educating people to save first and then take a loan. Prof. Harper compared microfinance institutions with the Raiffeisen Banken, which started off as cooperatives in rural parts of Germany and Austria, collecting money from the farmers and turning it into loans.

The problem is that you cannot compare the poverty of Bangladesh with that of the German or Austrian countryside in the 19th century. Bavarian farmers might not have been wealthy but they certainly had property (a cow, land, a farmhouse, seeds, etc.) that could be used as collateral for the loans they received from their Raiffeisen Bank. Poor people in Bangladesh don’t have this luxury; most of the times all they own are the clothes they have on their body.

Another criticism moved by Professor Harper  is that women are forced by the microfinance model into peer groups, which oblige them to cross-guarantee each other and to share the most intimate details of their financial situation. This shows how little Prof. Harper understands the dynamics of women’s groups. Women have a need for a sense of belonging. Even in industrialised countries, women get together in support groups to share intimate details of different aspects of their lives (career, child education, aging parents, etc.) and to receive support. In developing countries, organisations like Grameen Bank given women a support structure that strengthens their self-esteem and gives them the opportunity to make a living.

I guess there is a need out there for critics of microfinance like Prof. Harper to highlight the weaknesses of the model. However, the problem starts when critics resort to impossible comparisons and forget the circumstances under which microfinance organisations have to operate.

In my previous job, I had the enormous fortune to work with Prof. Yunus. I found his faith in humankind’s potential and the ability of poor people to work their way out of poverty highly inspiring. I remember how he told me that poor people have no memories of success and this is why they do not believe that their lives can change. Grameen has faith in people who have been taught for generations not to have faith in themselves.It is a pity that the importance of this message is lost on microfinance ‘insiders’ like Prof. Harper.