Hundreds Crowd Sibley to Hear Actress Speak on Microfinance

It is not often that hundreds of students gather in an auditorium to hear about microfinancing in the global south as they did last night­—but perhaps the crowd had more to do with the speaker.

Actress Natalie Portman took the stage at Sibley Auditorium as part of her campus tour promoting the Foundation for International Community Assistance, a nonprofit microfinance organization, and its Village Banking Campaign to aid one million of the world’s poor by 2010.

“I was really scared that there’d be a Star Wars fan and no one would be interested in my cause,” said Portman, Ambassador of Hope and co-chair for the organization.

Portman and Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies at UC Berkeley, discussed the benefits of microfinancing, a way of providing financial services to the poor in the form of small loans.

“Microfinancing is a compelling way for people, especially women in poverty, to move out of poverty,” Portman said, adding that women comprise 70 percent of the world's poor. “They can form a village bank, ensure each other’s loans, have meetings and pay the loans back once they’re able to.”

According to Portman, women

involved in microfinancing have noticed they now receive more respect from their husbands and children.

“You just see a whole situation that is able to change because of the idea that the poor should have access to banks,” Portman said. “It’s not rags to riches, but it certainly is improving.”

Weber admitted that although microfinancing has had successes over the past 10 years, it is not perfect.

“It has turned out to be harder to reach beyond densely populated urban areas to the rural poor,” he said.

Many in the audience said the speech was a call to action.

“The message was that young people can make a change,” said freshman Rachel Whyte.

Students said that the speech was informative, but not long enough to detail the foundation’s current efforts. Others thought that Portman’s celebrity status had more to do with the event’s popularity than students’ interest in microfinancing and global poverty.

“It was more about her celebrity status than the actual issue, which is expected,” said freshman Angela Miller. “But there’s no better way to invest your celebrity than for a good cause.”

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