The primary purpose of Lendwithcare
is to help poor people to improve their lives through supporting them to access
loans for their businesses. Do we actually have any evidence that this is
happening? Certainly, we have a great deal of anecdotal evidence – in addition
to the periodic updates that we receive from some of the microentrepreneurs
that we have funded, each year my colleagues and I also visit and speak with
hundreds of individuals and groups who Lendwithcare supports in 11 countries in
Africa, Asia and Latin America. Although we do come across some persons for
whom nothing much seems to have changed, more often than not they explain to us
how access to loans over an extended period of time has enabled them to develop
their businesses, stabilise or increase their incomes, increased their
self-confidence, self-esteem and economic independence, make improvements to their
homes, and sometimes as a result even spend more money in areas such as their children’s
education and the health of their families.
However, this approach is not
particularly scientific – there are often other important reasons aside from
improved access to loans why their lives have improved, it might be that we are
simply meeting the more ‘successful’ microentrepreneurs, people are simply being
polite, or they are telling us what they think we want to hear.
 |
| Ghulam Raza interviewing an entrepreneur at Akhuvat |
