Ongoing projects

At the moment, CERMi is promoting several projects and is involved in several others.

Action de Recherche Concertée (ARC)

Since 2016, CERMi-ULB is part of a 5-year ARC (Action de Recherche Concertée) project on financial mechanisms linked to natural resources exploitation and their impacts on riverine communities and organizations in Africa and Europe. It evolves around the sectors of mining exploitation, ecotourism and forestry. CERMi works on the impact of such financial mechanisms in organizations from the social economy sector within Asian and European forestry. 

Feasibility study of inter-company mutual credits in Brussels

The project concerns an inter-company mutual credit in the Brussels Capital Region (BCR). It is carried out in collaboration with Financité ASBL. The inter-company mutual credit mechanism allows companies to transfer ownership of goods and services to other companies in the network and receive other goods or services in return. These exchanges are not remunerated by payments in euros a posteriori but by instantaneous payments in a unit of account specific to the exchange network. Currently, there is no inter-company mutual credit mechanism in BCR. The study aims to determine, on the basis of an analysis of foreign examples and field surveys, whether they can be transposed to the Brussels context, under what conditions and with what impacts. 

Crédit de recherche (CDR)

Since 2021, CERMi-UMONS benefits from a CDR (Crédit de Recherche) funding from the FNRS to lead a project analyzing sectorial dynamics in the microfinance area, in the perspective of supporting the combination of financial and social goals by microfinance institutions. The project covers research on topics including – but not limited to – regulation, competition, and the management of professional networks, and applies to fields including Cambodia, Tanzania, and Benin, among others. 

BNB

In 2020, CERMi-UMONS obtained a funding from the 2020 Special Fund of the National Bank of Belgium to lead a project that aims to understand how social enterprises, and especially microfinance organizations, could develop their capacity for resilience in order to avoid mission drift. This project includes two main studies conducted in Cambodia.