2012: New Year, New Plans





© CARE/Emilie Bailey

Will 2012 be able to trump the success of 2011?

Christmas really was the season of goodwill at CARE  International UK. For lendwithcare.org, December was our best month yet. With more than 1300 gift vouchers purchased in December alone, it is clear that our lenders wanted to pass on the pleasure of lending and the message of lendwithcare to friends and family this Christmas.

Microinsurance: A safety net for the poor?



© CARE/ Josh Estey



It is becoming widely acknowledged that the provision of financial services to the poor is critical in the fight to alleviate poverty. One such financial service, which has been implemented relatively widely and successfully throughout much of the developing world, is microcredit. However, access to credit alone is not enough to guarantee financial security or stability. After all, microfinance is not just the provision of small loans but the provision of a whole host of financial services and includes microsavings, money transfer and microinsurance as well.

Christmas for Entrepreneurs Around the World

In Kishasa they sing through the night. In Mexico City, the streets and houses are adorned with bright red flowers that brings luck year round. In Russia, where snow is practically guaranteed, they swap presents at New Year and don’t celebrate Christmas until a week later. So how (indeed if at all) do lendwithcare entrepreneurs celebrate Christmas and how does it affect their businesses? We asked our MFIs exactly this. 

Microcredit and Job Creation

© CARE/ Emilie Bailey

When the aim is to create jobs then what is more effective, lending to the very smallest businesses, often referred to as microenterprises, or lending to slightly larger businesses commonly called Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). This was the question addressed by an interesting workshop that I attended recently on the relationship between microcredit and job creation at the Microcredit Summit in Valladolid, Spain. I am not sure that we reached any sort of agreement, apart from the obvious that both are important.

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.

What happens with loan repayments when a natural disaster occurs?

© CARE/Ami Vitale

I am currently in Cambodia where months of heavy rainfall have resulted in the worst flooding in a decade. This has left at least 247 people dead and damaged more than 390,000 hectares of agricultural land, including more than 10% of the country’s rice harvest. The floods have affected 1.2 million people across the country, but particularly those living along the Mekong River. Around 34,000 households have been evacuated to higher ground, and many roads, schools and homes have suffered damage.

Since early 2011 lendwithcare has been partnering with a local microfinance organisation, Cambodia Community Savings Federation (CCSF), which provides loans and other financial services to microentrepreneurs in the north-western provinces of Battambang and Banteay Meanchey, near the border with Thailand. While not as badly affected as other parts of Cambodia, many villages in the province remain isolated and under water. In some parts, cattle have been put in pens on small man made islands of earth, surrounded by flood waters. Many farmers have lost their entire rice crop as their farms have turned into lakes. In these situations, what happens to loan repayments?