Guest blog | Neville Wright: Why I Lendwithcare

Not only has Lender of the Week Neville Wright made an incredible 1,192 Lendwithcare loans in just over 2 years, but until the 15th May he is also generously using any profits from his recent book launch to further support Lendwithcare. Amazing support! We got in touch to ask how and why he first started supporting Lendwithcare entrepreneurs.

RubyMoon lends 100% of its profits to Lendwithcare women entrepreneurs

Lendwithcare now has a community of over 33,000 lenders, supporting over 45,000 entrepreneurs around the world.

One lender is ethical swimwear company RubyMoon, who uses 100% of their net profits to lend to women entrepreneurs through Lendwithcare. RubyMoon has been lending for 5 years, and so far has made 179 loans to women entrepreneurs and entrepreneur groups. We got in touch with founder Jo to find out more about why she wanted to involve RubyMoon in Lendwithcare, and her lending story so far.

Jo, founder of RubyMoon

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:

Muddy Bricks and Trainers

Thank God I didn’t buy new shoes!

All the roads in the “centre” of town are paved, and although crumbling at the sides where the pedestrians walk, there is not much drama walking around. The road outside my guesthouse which leads me to one of these wonderfully, albeit crumbling paved roads, is no such vision of convenience. The road outside my guesthouse is a soil track that every day is worked upon to try and turn it into a concrete one. Every day I win/attempt to win small battles with this road. Being soil, it gets everywhere so, there is not much point in hoping I’ll arrive either at work or at home without also carrying one, maybe two coats of terracotta dust with me. 

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.

Why are some microfinance loans not so 'micro'?

When asked recently by a lender why many of the loans featured on the lendwithcare.org website were rather large (often around £1,000) we explained why that might be:


1. At lendwithcare we believe that supporting small to medium enterprises (SMEs) often generates waged employment opportunities for some of the very poorest segments of the population. The latter occasionally do not even qualify for a microloan in their own right. This strategy of supporting a range of businesses we believe is more effective in tackling poverty than simply supporting one type of business.

Dr Ajaz Ahmed Khan: What role for Islamic microfinance?

Conventional interest based microfinance has come under increasing scrutiny and its benefits questioned in recent years. Does Islamic microfinance present a viable alternative? Quite possibly.