Secure Livelihoods Networking Meeting

(Wednesday 20^th June 2007)

Agenda

Day	Time	Activity	To meet objective	Led By	Comments
June 20th	8:30	Leave VSO Office for Conference Venue		Urnaa
	10:00	Meet and greet. Coffee		Urnaa
	10:30	Introduction to Conference.		Alison
		Feed back from last June		Alison
	11:00	Get it off Your Chest	Volunteer to Volunteer networking	David	Talk about our good and not so good placement experiences and to elicit help from Colleagues.
	12:00	Vision Fund	ICN	Tim Hooper	Introduction to micro credits availability.
	1:00	Lunch Followed by energizer session	Well Being!	Urnaa Duya
	2:00	Web based information sharing.	Volunteer to Volunteer networking	David	How to progress the information flow/communication.
	3:00	Secure Livelihoods Focus	ICN	David	Progress the document started at the last meeting.
	5:00	Walk/Meditation/Games	Well Being!
	7:00	Dinner and Disco Social Evening	Fun		Evening fun- pub quiz/ karaoke

Get it off Your Chest

Members of the group shared their frustrations and successes. From the last SL conference, Maija and Wyzta have successfully collaborated together to help the Women Farmers market their products. A good and enjoyable session.

Vision Fund

Tim Hooper from Vision Fund gave a very informative talk on opportunities for micro enterprise funding in Mongolia. Vision Fund (VF) was set up to finance World Vision projects but is now looking for ways to expand it’s area of lending to projects outside of the World Vision organization. VF is seeking suitable partners which have projects in need of funds. Khan Bank used to make loans as low as $400 but has recently moved the minimum to $1,200. VF are hoping to support projects of the type formed by business incubators with much smaller, unsecured loans.

Tim’s contact numbers are

Office 345323

Web tim_hooper@wvi.org

Our thanks to Tim for taking the time to be with us and for sharing his extensive experience of Mongolia’s development with the group.

Web based information sharing.

Work in this area is on going, with programme office moving to electronic distribution of information. But progress is slow. A concerted effort to collect the base line information is needed to kick start a meaningful and useful database. Ub tourist websites are to be trawled for useful information for new volunteers.

Secure Livelihoods Focus

The paper from the last SL conference was briefly discussed but in the absence of the Programme Area Manager, no progress was made. A tidied up version of the paper is on the way to the group via email