Paper
Environmental Sourcebook for Microfinance Institutions
What environmental concerns need to be considered?
84 pages
This sourcebook is designed to help MFIs improve their lending activities, and, specifically, to:
- Understand the importance of environmental well-being to the success of micro- enterprises;
- Improve the environmental performance of micro- enterprise projects and programmes;
- Improve the quality and expand the range of MFI activities;
- develop management techniques and programming options based on environmental motivations.
Presents environmental guidelines for:
- Food processing:
- Understand the role of the micro-enterprise in the local economy and its importance to the community as a creator of employment;
- Address any concerns community members have regarding the micro-enterprise;
- Ensure that drinking water sources or other productive uses of local services and resources are not compromised by the introduction of the food processing activity;
- Use more efficient technologies and processes.
- Aquaculture:
- Resolve all conflicts relating to common property resource ownership that characterise many aquaculture operations and that may jeopardise the operation;
- Maintain the highest construction standards possible;
- Use preventive management practices such as refiltering water or limiting the impact of salt water effluent by diluting it in a large water bed.
- Urban-based micro-enterprises: the choice of location should be the one for which the fewest adverse environmental impacts are anticipated, taking into account current land-use, adjacent uses and inherited problems;
- General environmental health and safety guidelines:
- Assess any health and safety risks to workers as a result of dust, fumes, odours, or pollutants;
- Rearrange work space to reduce risks, facilitate order and cleanliness and improve efficiency;
- Impress upon everyone the importance of keeping a work area clean, remove all rubbish from the work space and situate receptacles for waste and debris in convenient locations;
- Ensure proper ventilation of indoor operations;
- Ban smoking and drinking.
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