Speech by Marcel Lauzon, chairman of the Board of Directors, Développement international Desjardins

Montreal, March 31, 2007

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

You just saw, briefly I admit, one of the three television commercials that Desjardins created last fall to promote its cooperative difference. In it we saw a loan officer from SERFIR, one of the many community financial institutions supported by Développement international Desjardins… DID. Set up by DID in 2003, the SERFIR Mexican cooperatives today provide nearly 60,000 people with access to financial services, most of them indigenous peoples living in marginalized regions in Mexico.

I have not yet had the chance to visit these cooperatives, but barely six months ago I was in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, visiting the RCPB network, the Réseau des caisses populaires du Burkina. There I met with network director Daouda Sawadogo, who stood here on this stage last year. Despite everything that I had already heard about his institution, and all the others supported by DID, I was still fascinated by the degree of maturity and effectiveness of the network. It now delivers a wide range of financial services customized to the very diverse needs of the population. Its Federation has just reorganized to maximize efficiency and improve governance. Its Centre financier aux entrepreneurs business centre, set up in 2004, is contributing to the growth of hundreds of small local businesses and has already achieved a very satisfactory level of profitability and expertise in credit. The institution is now in the process of setting up a Confederation and a central agency fund that will also provide services to five other networks in West Africa. This visit showed me just how relevant and valuable the experience, expertise and intercooperation efforts of the Desjardins Group have been for these institutions which now consider Desjardins their prime source of inspiration.

My trip to Burkina Faso coincided with the fourth and last familiarization tour provided to directors of Desjardins financial cooperatives under the North-South Partnership. While accompanying the directors of the St-Raymond and St-Joseph de Hull financial cooperatives I was introduced to the daily operations of these African cooperatives and witnessed the effectiveness of the RCPB network, and I saw the level of complexity of DID support activities. One example is the project to computerize African financial cooperatives. To meet this challenge requires a global, long-term outlook. It also calls for a very good understanding of our partners and their circumstances, and a real desire to help them improve their performance and sustainability. So to DID, and the 270 Desjardins financial cooperatives that provided assistance for this project, I extend a salute for the excellent results you have helped achieve.

In November, I went to Halifax for the Global Microcredit Summit. The goal of the Summit, which drew 2000 delegates from 112 countries and brought the United Nation's International Year of Microcredit to a close, was to summarize the current state of affairs concerning efforts to improve access to financial services around the world. DID and several of its partners made statements at many of the summit's platforms for discussion. This enabled us to highlight the Desjardins cooperative difference and the major role that we play in fostering better access to financial resources, both here and in some of the world's most disadvantaged countries.

In addition to the Summit activities, I sat down with 22 managers from DID partner cooperative financial networks who had all come to share their experience and promote their values and model for performance. These managers had just set up Proxfin, an international study and discussion network, demonstrating their concern for ongoing improvement in their performance. I would like to salute the members of the Proxfin Management Committee who have traveled from Mexico, Lithuania, Burkina Faso, Sri Lanka and Tanzania to be with us today.

I must tell you that, whether it is at this meeting, during a trip to Burkina Faso or in one of my many meetings with the team at DID, I am always pleasantly surprised to observe the strong ties that bind us together. These are ties built on mutual respect, friendship, mutual assistance and understanding. And they produce results of the best kind.

The images that you are about to see are the best proof…