Founded in 1999 as the Microenterprise Development Institute, the Carsey Institute’s Sustainable Microenterprise and Development Program (SMDP) provides training and networking opportunities for practitioners in the fields of microfinance, enterprise development, social enterprise, and community-based and rural development. Over the past thirteen years, we have trained more than 1,600 practitioners from more than seventy-five countries around the globe. The SMDP offers an intensive professional training experience with a concentration on program planning and implementation of client and community inclusive economic development strategies.

Consistently, the SMDP training workshops have been rated as “very good” to “excellent” by 98 percent of program participants. Since its inception, the program has provided an affordable, high quality, and accessible professional development opportunity which counts among its alumni many of today’s leaders of the development finance field.

Courses and Faculty

Course topics cover a wide range of best practices from financial, risk, and human resource management, social performance monitoring and management, value chain and ProPoor market development, social enterprise, savings groups led microfinance, and sustainable responses to climate change.

The program maintains a commitment to providing highly relevant and effective practitioner training for programs for mid- to upper-level managers, board members, government officials, donors, and others working in microfinance, enterprise and value chain development, and other non-profit and for-profit economic and business development organizations and initiatives.

The SMDP features a diverse and extremely talented faculty of some of the most regarded practitioner experts in the broad microfinance and enterprise development fields. Many of the SMDP faculty have published extensively, teach in other training programs such as the Boulder MFT and the School of Applied Microfinance, and are viewed as leaders in the development field.

SMDP Educational Philosophy

We strive to make the SMDP training workshops in New Hampshire and Africa affordable and practical for a wide range of development organizations by offering modular one- and two-week enrollment options, group discounts, and access to scholarship funding.

The SMDP New Hampshire learning experience is based on a learner-centered model in its approach to education and is based on the following principles:

• Education promotes critical thinking and empowers the learner to act effectively.
• Experience is a rich resource for learning. Participants' prior experiences are integrated into the learning process. Participants play an active role in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of his or her learning experience.
• Cultural diversity and a respect for cultural diversity enhance the learning process and are an integral part of sustainable development practice.
• We promote development from holistic and systems approaches centered on the triple bottom lines of “people, planet, profit.”
• Whenever possible, we foster the development of on-going student networks, including Communities of Practice (COP) around interest areas highlighted during our training and academic programs.

Upcoming Sustainable Microenterprise and Development Programs

June 17 through June 29, 2013, SMDP New Hampshire Certificate, Durham, New Hampshire USA
(on the University of New Hampshire campus)

Read about program coordinator Bill Maddocks.