On Monday I made a trip out to a small village near Oshakati, Namibia’s second largest city. I went to profile a group of women that receive small ($25-$300USD) loans from our newest partner, Project Hope Namibia. Project Hope operates a small microfinance institution, and we’re teaming up with them to allow ordinary people, such as yourself, to make small loans to some of the poorest people across northern Namibia. Here’s a little background on Project Hope:
Project Hope Namibia, a USAID funded Micro-finance Institution
The Mission of Project HOPE is to achieve sustainable advances in health care by implementing health education programs and providing humanitarian assistance in areas of need. In Africa, Project HOPE engages and empowers women and families by creating sustainable, integrated, community based health programs. In Namibia, the foundation of this project is to expand Project HOPE’s Village Health Bank (VHB) methodology to families supporting and caring for orphans and vulnerable children (OVC). This is done by providing small-scale loans to groups of women to start or expand their income generation activities along with valuable health education in a capacity building environment. The project has expanded to reach elderly caregivers, orphan headed households, and young girls/women.
All loan recipients receive health education & business skills training
What we’re attempting to do is pair lenders, such as yourself, with loan seekers in Namibia. You lend a small amount of money to an aspiring entrepreneur through Promote Africa/Project Hope, and as the loan is repaid, you get your money back. And if you’re thinking, “What if they don’t pay back the loan?” Project Hope’s default rate is less than 5%. The key to their approach is group-lending, whereby all loan recipients belong to four-person groups called ‘solidarity groups,’ (SGs) so that if any member of the SG defaults, the others are responsible for loan repayment. The resultant peer pressure ensures extremely low default rates, even though Project Hope lends to the poorest of the poor.
So, the purpose of my visit was to profile the first group of loan recipients that will receive funding from the Promote Africa/Project Hope partnership. Please, please check out the loan recipients here. Read their bios and get to know more about this project. As you’ll notice on their profile pages, we asked them a number of personal questions in a questionnaire that we distributed (which was translated into Oshiwambo). Probably the most memorable moment of spending Monday with the group of women was when we asked them for the number of dependants (people who rely on their income) they had. I sat and watched while many of the women counted through both hands multiple times. Eventually, because several of the women were unable to keep track of all of their dependents, we had to set an upper limit. Any woman with more than 15 people relying on their income was allowed to simply write in “15+”. This simplified things and hurried the process along.
I joined the women of the Omulumbu Village Health Fund
This week, we’ve launched our fundraising campaign for several projects, including partnerships with Project Hope, Omuthitu Combined School, BEN Namibia and Yelula, the sum of which we’re calling Banking Without Borders. In the spirit of holiday giving, please pick a project and help us help them. Happy holidays everyone!!
