VivoccoStrategy - envisioning change in Bosnia and Herzegovina

"If you want your ideas to be driven into a realistic future, work with Creative Metier, with trust, true values, universal ones, and orderly disciplined delivery of what you agreed on.”

Nejira Nalic, Director, MI-BOSPO, Bosnia

Working on Strategy with MI-BOSPO, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Introduction to case study
Creative Metier was commissioned to work with the Director of Mi-BOSPO on her own career future and on the future strategy for the organisation.

  • Developing strategy
  • Clarifying complex situations
  • A safe pair of hands
  • Finding a new way forward

Client: MI-BOSPO – Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Situation:

In autumn 2008, Creative Metier delivered an assignment on behalf of the international microfinance organisation Women’s World Banking with Mi-BOSPO in Tuzla, Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Mi-BOSPO is a microfinance organisation currently making business and consumer loans to 31,000 low income women entrepreneurs.

Mi-BOSPO is currently applying for conversion to company status as a non-banking financial company (NBFC). When this registration is achieved the current founder and Director Nejira Nalic will leave the organisation after 13 years, having built the organisation to the position it occupies today.

The assignment had two distinct aspects; the first was to work with the founder and Director of Mi-BOSPO to help her to think through her own future direction using the Programme now known as Vivocco100.

The second was to, with the Director, develop a strategy for the NGO after the NBFC is formed. When the new company is founded, the lending that is the main focus of the NGO’s operation will pass into the NBFC. The NGO will need to find a new role and it was anticipated that the Director would continue to lead the NGO to support the social mission of the company’s clients.

Results
The Director pioneered an initiative to set up a new organisation, working with other microfinance institutions and with other institutions in the financial sector in Bosnia to establish one of the first debt advice centres in the world for microfinance clients. Creative Metier was asked to carry out the feasibility study for this project in co-operation with IFC GEM.

Women’s World Banking www.womensworldbanking.org asked Creative Metier to develop a strategic planning manual for other microfinance institutions going through a similar process of change.

Creative Metier was also asked to deliver an ongoing coaching programme for the Director to work with her through the complex strategic change that the organisation is now undertaking.

Creative Metier really moved this situation forward. There is an exciting strategic initiative emerging in the debt advice centre in Bosnia, and we will have a strategy manual to make the learning from this situation available to other members of the network and to the industry as a whole - a really safe pair of hands

Anna Gincherman
Director, Formalisation and New Product Development, Women’s World Banking