附录1RURAL FINANCE: MAINSTREAMING INFORMAL FINANCIAL INSTITUTIONSBy Hans Dieter SeibelAbstractInformal financial institutions (IFIs), among them the ubiquitous rotating savings and credit associations, are of ancient origin. Owned and self-managed by local people, poor and non-poor, they are self-help organizations which mobilize their own resources, cover their costs and finance their growth from their profits. With the expansion of the money economy, they have spread into new areas and grown in numbers, size and diversity; but ultimately, most have remained restricted in size, outreach and duration. Are they best left alone, or should they be helped to upgrade their operations and be integrated into the wider financial market? Under conducive policy conditions, some have spontaneously taken the opportunity of evolving into semiformal or formal microfinance institutions (MFIs). This has usually yielded great benefits in terms of financial deepening, sustainability and outreach. Donors may build on these indigenous foundations and provide support for various options of institutional development, among them: incentives-driven mainstreaming through networking; encouraging the establishment of new IFIs in areas devoid of financial services; linking IFIs/MFIs to banks; strengthening Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) as promoters of good practices; and, in a nonrepressive policy environment, promoting appropriate legal forms, prudential regulation and delegated supervision. Key words: Microfinance, microcredit, microsavings。1. informal finance, self-help groups In March 1967, on one of my first field trips in Liberia, I had the opportunity to observe a group of a dozen Mano peasants cutting trees in a field belonging to one of them. Before they started their work, they placed hoe-shaped masks in a small circle, chanted words and turned into animals. One turned into a lion, another one into a bush hog, and so on, and they continued to imitate those animals throughout the whole day, as they worked hard on their land. I realized I was onto something serious, and at the end of the day, when they had put the masks into a bag and changed back into humans, I started asking questions. I learned that they worked as a group, tackling the fields of each one in turn, carrying out all the tasks performed by men. For the activities attributed to the female sex, the women organized their own group (Seibel, 1967). During subsequent visits to each of the 17 ethnic groups in Liberia over extensive periods in the two years that followed, I continued to ask questions. The study started with group work; it ended with informal finance. All over Liberia, I found people forming self-help groups in which each person regularly contributed equal amounts of something valuable: labor, rice, money or other items. Among the Gbandi, Loma and Kissi in the northeast, you could still find masses of twisted iron rods, with one flat and one round end, the so-called Kissi pennies. This was once the local currency before the Americo-Liberians introduced the US dollar. In all of these groups, one participant at a time received the accumulated total which he could use for his own individual benefit: to fell trees with the help of a rotating work group, to feed a wedding party with the rice accumulated by a rice savings group, or as microenterprise working capital provided by a rotating savings group. A cycle was considered to be complete when each member had received the total once over. A new cycle could then start with the same or a different membership. Accumulating and reallocating labor, rice and money are three seemingly different forms of economic cooperation. Yet in the eyes of a peasant whom I met in the Ivory Coast in 1985, they are all about financial intermediation: Le travail, cest notre argent! In Ghana, in 1979, I saw groups of women jointly producing palm-oil which they sold on the market, allocating the proceeds to one member of the group at a time. Most of these groups also provided social insurance by allocating scarce resources, out of turn, to members in emergency situations. In the early days this consisted mainly of food items, whereas nowadays it is usually money. With the expansion of the money economy, these informal financial institutions (IFIs) have not lost their vigor. Quite to the contrary, they have multiplied, both in number and diversity. Banks, with their inappropriate products and practices, have not prevented the IFIs from spreading. In many instances, even the staff of commercial and central banks (as in the case of Bank Indonesia) have been found to participate. Some banks have even adopted the financial technologies used, such as daily deposit collection adopted by Bank Dagang Bali in Indonesia and by the Northern Mindanao Development Bank in the Philippines. 2.From Traditional Organizations to Microfinance My first studies in the 1960s were devoted to traditional organization