A story we passed over ear­lier this week was brought back to our atten­tion today by a blog post at The ONE Cam­paign. Chevron recently signed an agree­ment with USAID to help boost Angola’s econ­omy. Chevron already has a large oil con­cern in the coun­try. Now the dona­tions of money to USAID will help improve other areas of Angola’s economy.

First let’s get the news story, from San Fran­cisco Times busi­ness reporter Eliz­a­beth Rauber.

Sec­re­tary of State Hillary Clin­ton wit­nessed the Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing (MOU) for the project in Angola’s cap­i­tal, Luanda. Accord­ing to the doc­u­ment, the part­ner­ship will sup­port finan­cial, edu­ca­tional, tech­ni­cal and train­ing ser­vices to improve the via­bil­ity of small and medium scale farm­ers in the south­ern African state.

Accord­ing to Chevron spokesman Scott Walker, the MOU is an exten­sion to the $56 mil­lion Angola Part­ner­ship Ini­tia­tive, cre­ated in 2002. The orig­i­nal part­ner­ship was com­prised of a $25 mil­lion invest­ment by Chevron, and $31 mil­lion from USAID and other devel­op­ment orga­ni­za­tions. The new MOU focuses on agri­cul­tural ini­tia­tives to increase yield and mar­ket share for small to medium scale farm­ers. This new agree­ment fol­lows a 5-year, $5.6 mil­lion Agri­cul­ture Devel­op­ment and Finance Pro­gram that com­menced in 2006.

Chevron didn’t say how much it will put into this program.

Now, a clar­i­fi­ca­tion on what the MOI will actu­ally do for Angola from the ONE Campaign’s Beth Adler.

As Sec­re­tary Clin­ton men­tioned in her remarks, part of this invest­ment will be directed towards small­holder farm­ers in an effort to boost agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tiv­ity. Often oil-producers invest in sup­port for non-oil busi­ness in order to bol­ster social and polit­i­cal sta­bil­ity in a coun­try, which also helps pro­tect their oil-related invest­ments. The Mem­o­ran­dum of Under­stand­ing that was signed will pro­vide con­ti­nu­ity for the $56 mil­lion Angola Part­ner­ship Ini­tia­tive between USAID, Chevron, and other part­ners that sup­ports ini­tia­tives on edu­ca­tion, food secu­rity, gov­ern­ment capac­ity build­ing, and small busi­ness development.

And also, the Wall Street Jour­nal has a story today on the micro­cre­dit “bub­ble”. Some econ­o­mists cant fig­ure out why micro­cre­dit is still run­ning strong despite the global reces­sion. The Wall Street Jour­nal how­ever is a sub­scrip­tion web­site, so we were unale to devote a sin­gle post to it.

In a reac­tion to the news story, Char­lotte Con­nors knows very well why micro­cre­dit is suc­sess­ful. We found her expla­na­tion at Accion International’s blog.

Twenty-seven indus­try lead­ers and more than six hun­dred MFI’s, Investors, Donors, Net­works and Asso­ci­a­tions have got­ten behind the Cam­paign for Client Pro­tec­tion in Micro­fi­nance. First announced at the Clin­ton Global Ini­tia­tive in Sep­tem­ber 2008, the Cam­paign, under the lead­er­ship of the Cen­ter for Finan­cial Inclu­sion at ACCION Inter­na­tional and the Con­sul­ta­tive Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP), seeks to unite micro­fi­nance providers world­wide to develop and imple­ment stan­dards for the appro­pri­ate treat­ment of low-income clients, based on six prin­ci­ples, which the Cam­paign aims to embed within the fab­ric of the micro­fi­nance com­mu­nity. The first of these prin­ci­ples is avoid­ance of over-indebtedness (which has the sub­ject of the WSJ article).

The Cam­paign aims to develop norms, knowl­edge and tools that will help MFIs develop and main­tain a rig­or­ous focus on client wel­fare. The first of such tools, avail­able online, is a Client Pro­tec­tion Ques­tion­naire that pro­vides a detailed self-assessment of con­trols cur­rently in place.

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