Microfinance Initiative
Community Empowerment: Utmost Necessity
Our community based microfinance initiative issues entrepreneurship grants and collateral-free, interest-free loans to local community members with special emphasis on women and girls, in Edo State, Nigeria. We empower these community members with grants and interest-free loans so they can be able to start businesses, building assets and gaining business skills. Which in the long run allowing them to generate income, improving their household living standards, and achieving financial independence for themselves and their families.
Empowering women is crucial to a thriving society and by them basic business skills training and the financing to put their skills into action, they are able to start small businesses, increase family income, and achieve self-sufficiency.
Challenges
We are tackling poverty and the disenfranchise in rural Edo state, Nigeria. Most of these local community members, especially women, have no access to collateral necessary to get loans through commercial banks. These social barriers limit their ability to start up and scale up their small businesses, therefore making it difficult if not impossible to meet their basic needs.
- This is How We Help -
Taking Action
To build on assets that already exist in the local community, rather than depending on outside sources, we provide grants and interest-free loans to members of the community, with emphasis on empowering women and girls to be self-sustainable. By so doing, these community members can give back to their family, local community, and prepare for the next generation.
We provide interest-free grants and loans to locals interested in becoming small traders and artisans, including food sellers, carpenters, tricycle drivers, hairdressers, tailors, and cloth sellers.
Our mission is moral and clear: to help the poorest of the poor to be able to stand up for themselves, provide for their families, and economically grow their local community.
To qualify for these grants, we dutifully vet and select those who have been marginalized in society for these grants and for interest-free loans qualified individuals have six months to pay back the loans and we offer incentives for loan repayments.
Long-term Impact
Empowering local community members in Nigeria, and Edo state, in particular, promotes in-country development from the bottom up. Women become involved in grassroots movements and advocate for far-reaching social and economic changes in their own communities. Community members who are grants recipients priorities the use of their business profits for better nutrition, healthcare, and paying school fees for their children.
Our impact on these rural communities is about more than economic development: it’s about advancing human dignity and most of all, we create role models & leaders.