Interview with Jeffrey Ashe
Jeffrey Ashe is the Manager of Community Finance for Oxfam America. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Ecuador, he has worked with ACCION International, was head of the PISCES project, and started his own company, Working Capital, which worked on domestic microfinance.
Where do you live and work?
I live in Cambridge.
Where do you work?
I am the Manager of Community Finance for Oxfam America.
What exactly does that mean?
Well, I supervise our overseas microfinance activities in Mali and Cambodia. We are starting in Senegal also. We help groups manage their savings and finances; helping them distribute money to other local groups and organizations. It’s like a very primitive credit union. The idea is for these money-dispersing groups to be self replicating and sustainable and to fund their own projects.
What is a given day at the office like?
I actually spend about 3-4 months of the year abroad visiting projects, doing feasibility studies and evaluations. When I’m here, in Boston, I do a lot of project planning, as well as fundraising and writing reports on my trips. There’s also, of course, some bureaucratic stuff, like timesheets, but I try to delegate as much of that as possible, I like to delegate misery elsewhere. I also teach some courses on microfinance, at Brandeis and Columbia.
Do you enjoy your work?
Yeah, I really do. It’s really exciting. The simplicity of the project is breathtaking. It’s been really exciting to be involved in work that is changing the basic paradigm of microfinancing.
Did you always know that this is what you were interested in? What were you thinking, career-wise, back in high school?
In high school I though that I would join the Air Force and then the Foreign Service. Then, while in college, I realized that that was all pretty staid. I was at Berkeley, majoring in political science, in the sixties and it was a pretty radical time.
What did you do after graduation?
I joined the Peace Corps and went to Ecuador. I was in the Sierra, working with agrarian communities. It was like being catapulted back into the 15th Century which was…interesting. We set up the Campesino Leadership Training program in agrarian reform areas using techniques pioneered by Paulo Friere. We were trying to facilitate the division of large feudal-like estates among farmers and peasants. At night we’d sit up on the mountains, drink aguardiente and talk about revolution.
And when you got back?
When I got back I went to graduate school. I studied sociology, medical sociology, how groups of people at, say a mental institution, act and behave. I thought that I was interested in domestic issues at that point. Then I ran into this guy that I had met while in the Peace Corps who had become the director of ACCIÓN International. He offered me a job and I’ve been involved in microfinance ever since then, this was in the mid-70s. In 1980 I was the head of the PISCES Project, the first worldwide study of microfinance programs. After I did some freelance work for a while before starting up my own company, Working Capital. We did a lot of domestic microfinance. Now I’m at Oxfam.
Do you think you have any special skills that have helped make you successful?
I think being able to keep your eyes open and really see what’s going on is really important. You have to learn from what’s actually happening and be innovative. There are tons of opinions and ideas being thrown at you so it’s essential that you’re able to cobble them together, synthesize them.
Any other advice?
Yeah, definitely. The key is getting out there. You have to get out there. You have to go to a village and talk to people. Figure out what’s going on, what projects are already going on within the community. You have to ask questions. You have to listen and observe and understand the realities of actual situations. People take all of this “International Development” education and think they know what they’re talking about, but then they try to use it in a situation and it just doesn’t fit, at all. You have to go, you have to ask.
