Guest Blog - This Christmas, give the gift of giving.

This Christmas, give the gift of giving.
Posted on 30 November, 2014 by Keith Channing

Hang on; I didn’t mean that.

This Christmas, give the gift of lending.

For some months, my wife and I have been involved, in a small way, with Lendwithcare, a micro-finance organisation set up by Care International, one of the world’s leading aid and development organisations.

Microloans from CARE International UK The premise is simple: an entrepreneur in one of the world’s least affluent areas proposes a business idea to a microfinance intitution (MFI). The MFI approves the plan and grants the requested loan. The entrepreneur is then helped to construct a profile that appears on the lendwithcare.org web site. Supporters (that’s you and I) visit the site, select a profile that interests them, and make a contribution to support it. Once the full amount is reached, it is sent to the MFI, releasing their funds to support another entrepreneur.

As the supported business develops and grows, the loan is repaid, and the repayments find their way into your account with lendwithcare. You can then either withdraw them or, more likely, use them to finance another entrepreneur; and so the virtuous cycle continues.

Lendwithcare microloans making big differences in Togo, West Africa

A couple of weeks ago, Ajaz (Lendwithcare's Microfinance Advisor) and I headed out to Togo and Benin in West Africa to conduct the annual evaluation of our microfinance partners. Whilst there we also met some of the entrepreneurs receiving Lendwithcare loans.

 - Nancy Thomas, Lendwithcare Executive

 

Video updates from Togo part three: “A small loan is like oil in an engine; it allows people to move forward"

Finally, part three of Tracey's video updates from her April 2013 trip to Togo is here! Here are also parts one and two for some context.

To round off my blog/video updates from Togo, I wanted to share with you some lasting impressions from the trip.

The passion and commitment of the WAGES staff

Many of the office staff began their careers as Loan Officers, including the General Manager, Ramanou Nassirou who, when talking about the entrepreneurs said “most of them know how to run their business, we just provide them with a small loan to get them started - a small and affordable loan is like oil in a car engine; it allows people to move forward". 

I have already written about how WAGES supported clients who lost everything in the massive fires which swept through the great markets of Lomé and Kara last year and this demonstrates further the commitment that WAGES have to improving the lives of their clients. 

Video updates from Togo part two: collecting updates from the field

After the first part of our video updates from Togo in July, the wait is finally over! Here is part two, at last.

In my first blog about my trip to Togo, I mentioned that visiting our microfinance partner, WAGES, was of particular interest to me because of CARE’s long-standing relationship with the institution. However, the main purpose of my trip was to respond to our lenders’ desire for more updates on how their loans have impacted on the lives of the people they have supported.  So I travelled to WAGES to provide the loan officers who work with Lendwithcare some further training on how to provide updates and more specifically how they can use film to bring these updates to life.

The training was led by professional film makers Fiona Molloy and Nik Wood (the people that also put together our fab TV ad!) and I have to say the loan officers really enjoyed learning the tricks of the trade from Fiona and Nik.  They particularly enjoyed learning how shooting different kinds of footage rather than simply zooming in and out can improve a film.

These three women had specific messages they wanted to pass on to the Lendwithcare lenders:

Video updates from Togo part one: providing small loans to the financially excluded

In April I travelled to Togo to visit WAGES, our local microfinance partner, and a number of the micro-entrepreneurs we have supported through lendwithcare.org.  It was a particularly interesting trip for me because when I first started working for CARE International back in 1997, the “Women & Associations for Gains both Economic and Social” (WAGES) project was in the process of moving away from its origins as a small-scale group lending programme set-up by CARE and was transforming into an independent Microfinance Institution (MFI). I remember how CARE’s end of project evaluation had concluded that the WAGES project  was having such a positive impact on the lives of poor women and in order to help the many more thousands of people who could benefit from micro-loans, WAGES should became an independent entity.  This is why when we set up our lendwithcare.org initiative in 2010, WAGES was an obvious choice to be one of our very first partners.

Video update | Market fires in Togo & how lendwithcare.org's microfinance partner helped

Early this year two of Togo's biggest markets, Kara and Lomé, were devastated by fire. The fires, which occurred 48 hours apart, destroyed both marketplaces and the hundreds of businesses that lay within their walls.

 

Lendwithcare’s microfinance partner in Togo, WAGES, told us that the fires were a huge disaster and that many market vendors had lost everything – some lost all their money as well as their stock since they had kept it in the marketplace for safekeeping. A large number of the market vendors, particularly in the Grand Market of Lomé, are clients of WAGES and were faced with the added stress of how to meet loan repayments without a way to generate an income. In this short video update, we learn how WAGES helped clients to get their businesses back up and running as well as reworked repayment schedules (often pausing repayments) to give time for businesses to recover.