Day Three: BBC3's Stacey Dooley returns to Sarajevo to meet more lendwithcare.org entrepreneurs

On her final day visiting lendwithcare.org entrepreneurs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Stacey Dooley returns to Sarajevo and meets Mediha ...

Stacey with Mediha in her tailor shop in Sarajevo© CARE/Jon Spaull

Day Two: BBC3 journalist, Stacey Dooley, visits lendwithcare.org entrepreneurs in Srebrenica

On her second day visiting female entrepreneurs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, BBC3's Stacey Dooley travels to Srebrenica to see how microloans provided through lendwithcare.org are changing lives.

BBC3's Stacey Dooley with Sefika and her son, Adnam© CARE/Jon Spaull

BBC Three journalist, Stacey Dooley, visits lendwithcare entrepreneurs in Bosnia-Herzegovina

This week BBC Three journalist, Stacey Dooley, is visiting female entrepreneurs in Bosnia-Herzegovina who have received microloans through lendwithcare.org. Below she describes her first day meeting Azra Vatrenjak ...

Azra Vatrenjak in her shop in Sarajevo © CARE

Can Microfinance Create Sustainable Businesses?

Lendwithcare.org's Microfinance Advisor, Dr Ajaz Ahmed Khan, answers one lenders very pertinent question

Banking on Change in Uganda

© CARE/Tine Frank

A business owner and lendwithcare lender raised a very important question in an email to the lendwithcare team recently. Attracted to the lendwithcare model due to its emphasis on sustainable development and providing the working poor with a hand up instead of a hand out, he asked how, with loans alone, micro-entrepreneurs were able to create truly sustainable businesses that could benefit whole communities. We thought we would share Ajaz's answer with you all ...

Why I Lend: to help secure a happier future

Lendwithcare lender, Daniel Openshaw, tells us why he lends ...

Srebrenica Memorial

© CARE/Jon Spaull

I started to lend with care on the day that Ratko Mladic was put on trial in The Hague for genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity during the Bosnian war, 1992-95. Mladic's alleged atrocities rank amongst the worst in living memory; certainly they typify for most people the pointless horrors and bloodshed of war. He became known as the 'Butcher of Bosnia' by the media who love a nickname no matter how much it tends to trivialise the nature of heinous acts, but there was nothing trivial about Mladic's repeated slaughtering and raping under the guise of Serb nationalism. His most infamous attack was on Srebrenica, a Bosniak town under supposed UN protection in 1995 where he rounded up Bosniak boys and men and over five days his forces shot dead more than 7,500 before burying them in mass graves.

Sustainable Development: Interview with Lendwithcare's Microfinance Advisor, Dr Ajaz Khan



© CARE/Jon Spaull

It is one of the great paradoxes of the developing world. Those individuals in most need of banking services and credit are the most likely to lack sufficient collateral to support it.  In the past decade, there has been increasing focus on microfinance as a tool to alleviate poverty and sustain business models. Microfinance is not charity.  There is an increasing perception that charity perpetuates poverty whereas it is believed that microfinance can enable an individual to build on their skills and provide a sustainable method of improvement.

Lendwithcare.org recently launched in the United Kingdom.  It is an initiative from Care International UK in association with The Co-operative.  We speak to Dr. Ajaz Khan, CARE’s Microfinance Advisor, about microfinance, Lendwithcare.org and what you can do to get involved.

Alastair Stewart OBE report from Bosnia

Bosnia and micro-finance

A weekend in Bosnia with one of the charities I support:



© CARE/ Jon Spaull

The day before I left for Bosnia-Herzegovina I had been grilling MPs in London about the Autumn Statement, the UK’s public spending crisis and the Coalition’s austerity package. Here, unemployment is 40% and the state levies an effective 70% jobs tax – it is the economics of the mad-house. Widows of the civil war, particularly the genocide of Srebrenica, literally scrape a living from the cold soil. Buildings, twenty years on, still bear the pot-mark battle-scares of shelling while others remain empty wrecks- crumbling monuments to lives lost, people disappeared.

CARE International UK Chief Executive reports from Bosnia Herzegovina

 


© CARE/Jon Spaull

  CARE UK Chief Executive Geoffrey Dennis writes from Bosnia and Herzegovina where he is with ITN’s Alastair Stewart visiting the latest entrepreneurs to be added to Lendwithcare.

Landing in Sarajevo 19 years after I was last here during the war, I was quite surprised to see a lot of buildings and infrastructure are still in the same poor condition as they were then, some exactly as I last saw them. We travelled to Srebrenica early this morning, which economically and physically appears to still be in a very bad way. Buildings still bear bullet marks from the conflict. The economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina has slowed down considerably, particularly since 2008, and as a result approximately 40 per cent of working age people are unemployed.