PLEASE READ THIS: Me and the loan sharks again…
Can we not partner with a bank / respected financial institution to roll out a massive “understand compound interest” training movement throughout the country? We do this as part of being proud South Africans. We have contacts with financial institutions. We also have contacts with VERY good trainers (in Sotho, Zulu, English, Afrikaans and maybe more,,,). The plan is this: We streamline the business plan. We get a few financial companies into the deal. 
We appoint a programme manager who gets paid out of the overall budget. (I have someone in mind already). We get a training designer to design the learning material ( I can help with this, but Estelle Gallager will be the perfect one). We line up train-the-trainers (I can also help training them). We line up teams from the sponsoring companies to do the training themselves. We make this a buildingUP/reachingOUT angle and capitalize on the team building benefits it has. We splash it all over the media. We make a difference on all levels of society.
Listen people: There are people out there who get cash loans in order to pay off other cash loans!!! AAARRGGHHH – this really hurts me. And they live in small RDP-houses and they are supposed to support entire families. Let’s not wait for government to solve this…
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Take a look at this article from Fast Company (http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/87/open_essay.html) to see an example in the space you’re suggesting….
“In the developing world, Pro-Ams are solving a historical scarcity of professional resources. The Grameen Bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economics professor, trains barefoot bankers to deliver loans to people earning less than a dollar a day. This Pro-Am workforce makes it possible to cost-effectively administer 2.8 million loans worth more than $4 billion. Had Grameen relied on professionals, it would have reached a tiny proportion of the population.”
The problem is that the people who borrow from Micro Lenders cannot get loans from the larger institutions. What they repay is terrible. Borrow R3000 and you repay R12000 over 12 months. They however contend that a fast food outlet makes a profit of between 100% and 500% over a much shorter period of time. Certain retail stores that sell on credit have the same type of profit margins.
Compared to the above, they have a small profit margin. Money has become a commodity and they actually sell money. I think most people have an ethical problem with the concept and compare Banking Standards with Micro Lending. They are not the same. A regulated Micro Lending industry is needed when one considers that the real Loan Sharks have a 100% per month interest rate, whereas the requlated industry is 30%.