A tribute to a microfinance legend – to NICOLAS ROFÉ

For a whole generation of actors who discovered microfinance in the 1990’s, Nicolas Rofé was forerunner, with 15 years ahead on the rest of the sector in Francophone Africa. He passed away in September 2014 after a long illness, after a life worthy of a novel. In Microfinance, it will be remembered that he turned a Very Small Enterprise – Small and Medium Enterprise (VSE-SME) credit project into a failure, which he took over the management in 1988-1990, in one of the most successful microfinance projects in the WAEMU countries: LTN Senegal.

I remember the first studies that I have done with AFD and CGAP in 1998-1999: many of us were impressed with both the ability of LTN Senegal (and its “clones”) to generate healthy individual credit and balance the accounts in a few years, while managing without difficulty the withdrawal of the permanent technical assistant. In the jungle of projects and more or less professional networks that crowded the sector at the time, it was a small revolution. Nicolas Rofé’s desire to track down unnecessary costs and the “functionalization” of agents[5] was also, where so many others wallow in the comfort of subsidies…  microfinance at the service of business financing and in the image of many entrepreneurs: rough and without unnecessary grease.

Loan agencies for private enterprise (LTN) that he created later in Madagascar, Cameroon, and recently in Burkina Faso and Niger, are all testimonies of his work. His achievement will continue with structures provided and people that he trained.

Nicolas ROFÉ and Pancho OTERO probably share the characteristic of being much more in their element in a Latin American or African market, among their natural «customers», than in international conferences. Nicolas ROFÉ didn’t want to be the « boss » of a holding company, managing his subsidiary companies with an eye on economic and financial dashboards. At the time where microfinance seems to become financialized, or even to take the path of disintermediation, and where the development of new technological tools sometimes makes it possible to accelerate the examination of the loan file (through information provided by the loan offices, even to the notes of rating systems or « credit scoring »), it is not useless to remind one of the key learning of LTN, namely the importance given to the human factor and the perfect knowledge of, de visu and in situ, of each customer and his company by the loan office.

Allow me to pay them this tribute. Extract from «Guide to Microfinance Regulation … and Financial Inclusion», Laurent Lhériau, Third edition, coordinated by Eneida Del Hierro, AFD.