Franck Daphnis was born and raised in Port-au-Prince Haiti. Trained as an urban planner and architect at Cornell University and the University of Wisconsin, he has worked extensively with microfinance programs for the past ten years. As the Director of Field Program Operations for CHF International, he has directly overseen the design and implementation of microfinance programs in more than twenty countries around the world and played a key role in the creation and management of seven local microfinance institutions. Since the year 2000, Mr. Daphnis has been on the faculty of the Microfinance Training Program in Boulder, Colorado. Mr. Daphnis lives in North Bethesda, Maryland, with his wife and daughter.
Bruce Ferguson was trained as an urban planner at the University of California, Berkeley and UCLA. Over the last twenty-five years, he has worked in housing, urban, and economic development in the United States and internationally. For the past decade, he has focused on designing housing and urban programs, mainly for the Inter-American Development Bank, where he leads a housing group for Central America, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic. A conference he organized in 2000 on the topic helped focus attention of the microfinance and housing finance communities on this practice in Latin America. Dr. Ferguson lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland with his wife and two sons.