is ten feet high.
Microfinance captured my heart last March in the train station in Rome when I bought a book called The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time by Jeffrey Sachs. Changed my life.
The idea is simple: It takes money to make money. Duh. The thing is, we're not in New Yor City talking about big real estate investments or arbirtrage transactions that make millionaires into billionaires. We're in a slum in Central America talking about a $50 stove that turns your backyard into the village bakery and provides enough income for you to feed your family breakfast send one daughter to school.
Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank won the Nobel Peace Prize last year for microfinance efforts in third world countries. The Grameen Bank is a for-profit institution; these are not hand-outs. Microfinance involves making $200ish loans to entrepreneurs who could make significant profits from such investments. But of course they have to pay them back with interest (usually equal to the inflation rate in the country). This is the stuff of poverty alleviation.
Loans are usually given to women, as research shows that they tend to be more likely to spend their earnings on the family than men, and Manna's focus in Nicaragua is on helping poor women become self-sufficient in a male dominated culture.
MPI gave individual loans of $115- $200 to six women last March in Cedro Galan after an economics professor and group of students from Worcester State College in Massachusetts visited the site and got things started. They have been turning the program over to MPI in recent months.
Enter Julie. I can't wait to help this program grow. I've got some ideas and can't wait to learn. How do you say interest rate in Spanish?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment