National Tardiness Campaign: will it work?

Recently, Perú's president Alan Garcia launched a campaign called "La Hora Sin Demora"(time without delay) against a perceived endemic national (or even transnational) problem: tardiness. Although campaigns like this appear to be popular in Perú, I doubt that ringing a bell at Lima's Plaza de Armas. Begging the Peruvian populus to be on-time ("Hora Inglesa", English Time instead of "Hora Peruana", Peruvian Time which always has a lag of a few hours), will make the country do things any faster or punctual.

Actually, my opinion is that things have progressively gotten better over the last few years. Punctuality is one thing, reliability of business deals and appointments in another. We have visited Perú almost yearly over the last ten years, and lately (hah-no pun intended) things have become more reliable. You can agree on the plumber to visit your residence tomorrow morning, and there's now a reasonable chance that he'll actually show up. You can ask Telefónica for a phone connection, and they'll keep their appointments about as good as Verizon would here in the Northeastern US.

Interestingly, and disappointingly, getting one or more MFI's signed up with Kiva appears not to be part of this deal. With some difficulty, last month I managed to meet a representative of a Swiss NGO that does "technical assistance" to MFIs in Lima. We discussed the possibilities and the advantages of any MFI to get funded by Kiva, and he appeared all enthusiastic about the possibilities. I even followed-up with Kiva, who because they're working at or over capacity signing up new MFIs, really couldn't give any personalized assistance. Unfortunately, things are moving at the speed of "mañana", which means that my estimate is, that my efforts won't have any results until 2008 or so. Simply disappointing.

I hope that president Alan Garcia's campaign will also penetrate in the slow-moving world of Microfinance Banking.