Azerbaijan Micro-finance Association (AMFA) is a 15 years old country level microfinance association that has been grown over the last 1.5 decade time into one of the successful business associations in ECA region. Till date AMFA have been successful in development its credibility and professional expertise in various fields: Responsible Finance, Financial Education, Consumer Protection, Financial transparency, Financial Inclusion, Responsible Finance has attracted attention of AMFA since 2009 as a result of aggressive lending launched by some of the downscaling banks in the country that caused disruption of credit culture within MFIs and their clients. As a lessons learned from crises happened in America and Europe AMFA launched preventive measures via implementing applicable projects, initiatives and consulting services.
Under its strategic pillar of Continuing Education AMFA team conducted numerous trainings, seminars, conferences and study tours in the country and abroad covering development, discussions and sharing lessons learnt on various aspects of responsible finance, mentoring of Financial Educators, networking with Financial Educators in Central Asia countries as well as in Central and Eastern Europe via various regional and international project activities.
Since 2009 till date under its strategic pillar of Innovative Products and Services AMFA team has been specialized in conducting different type of trainings & smart assessments including and not limited to financial education, social performance indicators, social performance management assessment, social performance audit, client protection principles assessment and other customized trainings targeting both staff of FIs as well as their borrowers. Such services were rendered to microfinance institutions, credit unions, downscaling banks in Azerbaijan and Georgia. AMFA was one of the first national networks in the region that expressed its interest in learning and upgrading its knowledge based on Responsible FInance during a weeklong training course on SPM organized by MFC in Warsaw on January 2005. Moreover, AMFA was successful in engaging participation of one of its member organizations- VF AzerCredit. Effective FY 2006 AMFA together with its member VF AzerCredit joined the Working Group on SPM and was proactively contributing to its work by regular participation at the SPM WG meetings in different countries.
In FY 2007 AMFA succeeded in development of project proposal aiming to introduce and promote SPM in Azerbaijan and decided to partner with MFC to access technical knowhow and coaching support that was needed to build in-house association team specialized on SPM issues.
AMFA conducting Trainings, Assessments, Consulting and Research On Responsible Finance experience including development of training materials, adaptation of training manual towards local country context, Training of Trainers, Training of the personnel of the Financial Institutions, training for potential and existing microfinance borrowers as well as other complimenting projects such training on over-indebtedness , social performance indicators trainings & assessments, client protection training and smart assessments as well as survey on financial literacy.
The database of AMFA for conducting financial literacy trainings covers around 22 Financial Education Experts whereas 5 of them represent the top senior Managers that have nearly 5 years of expertise in development of financial education training materials, publications as well as mentoring expertise.
Our specialists/consultants specialized in different area (develop training methodology, design training materials, monitoring and evaluation of the training impact, training of Trainers and Training Managers, Branch Managers, prepare final report including recommendations, present findings and etc.) and provide high-quality services to government agencies, international and financial institutions.