Microfinance Regulatory and Policy Assessment in SADC: Case Study of Namibia, Tanzania, and Zambia

This report provides an in-depth analysis of microfinance regulations and policies in three countries of the South African Development Community (SADC): Namibia, Tanzania, and Zambia. It proposes general principles that could be adopted by regulators in a SADC framework for regulating microfinance. The study includes case studies that were used to extract lessons of relevance to all countries within the SADC. These case studies were conducted through on-site stakeholder interviews with key informants including regulators, industry associations, credit bureaus, international experts, MFIs, banks, and other financial service providers. The report provides the following key recommendations:

• Most SADC countries, in particular those in which over-indebtedness is a growing concern, need to invest in resources for market conduct supervision;
• Rules on affordability and measuring over-indebtedness must be explicit and not be left to self-regulation by the private sector;
• Regulators should be able to share experience on progress made and where stumbling blocks exist with respect to credit reporting systems;
• Regulators should discuss funding model for non-prudential regulation;
• SADC regulators could work together on establishing minimum reporting standards, reports that would be produced by regulators on the entire microfinance/microcredit sector and may be, a yearly consolidated report at SADC level.