1.)     In ‘A company with a difference’ by Jerry Brady, read how one social enterprise is making a difference for a group of people long excluded from the financial system: people with disabilities.

2.)    In ‘To be a woman is to…‘ by Kate McGrath, learn about the work of Génesis Empresarial and one of their most successful groups of women entrepreneurs.

3.)    In ‘Inside in the cold’ by Charlene Nemson, see what air conditioning means for development in the country.

4.)    In ‘Can we call him a social entrepreneur?‘ by Guila Angi, meet a client of Paraguay’s Financiera El Comercio and learn about his successful dairy business and the additional support he lends to other budding businesses in his community.

5.)    In ‘The stuff that doesn’t get lost in translation‘ by Asya Tabdili, find out how Accion is providing financial literacy training to thousands of entrepreneurs in India – by watching a video she created.

6.)    In ‘Mobile Money Part I (Strange Bedfellows) and Mobile Money Part II (Different Strokes)‘ by Abhishank Jajur, you can finally get the basics of mobile banking – in a fresh and clear way.

We’re about to kick off another great summer of stories from the field from around the world of microfinance – so stay tuned for the best of 2013 from Paraguay, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and India.

With the Month of Microfinance upon us, I wanted to share a story about the power that financial education can have on its students.

Last month, the staff of Accion’s Dialogue on Business (DOB) entrepreneurship training program wanted to find a way to celebrate International Women’s Day on March 8 with our students. We started our thinking along traditional lines of celebration, like a ceremony to congratulate our entrepreneurial students, maybe accompanied by a traditional dance and a snack, but our initial brainstorming didn’t prepare us for the inspirational events that unfolded…

We ended up asking the women themselves how they wanted to celebrate. After all, this was a day to celebrate their independence, so it seemed only fitting! These women—all microentrepreneurs trained by DOB in stitching, tailoring and embroidery work—typically work from home and earn somewhere between 500 and 1500 rupees a month (just U.S. $10–30) just through their embroidery and tailoring projects.

To our surprise, the women chose to do an exposure visit – a field trip for the women to experience something new to them – an idea that we had only briefly considered. One of the most active women in the group strongly supported the idea, but she needed someone to care for her young baby in order to participate. When all the other women offered to take care of the baby in turns, that settled it—an exposure visit it was!

When the discussion began about where the group would go on their exposure visit, one of the women asked about the big glass buildings in the city. We soon realized that the woman was referring to the many shopping malls that dot the landscape of Ahmadabad City.  Many of the others had also noticed the malls before, but had always thought they were exclusively for rich people and that they would not be allowed to enter.  We decided that this would be a perfect place to visit: we wanted to show the women that these malls are inclusive urban spaces created for everyone—and that they were welcome just as much as anyone else was.

The group in front of the entrance of Alpha One.

We picked Alpha One, a mall with special wing called Ranino Hajiro that houses a handicraft and traditional ethnic market. We wanted the women to see how some of the products that they help create now are refined and later sold at an outlet like this one. This would allow the women to see just how far their skills and growing enterprise could potentially take them.

For the second stop on our visit, we wanted to show the women how they could get from where they are today to a place like Ranino Hajiro. The Sewa Federation runs a design and marketing unit that trains women on different skills and also invites female entrepreneurs to sell products at their marketing outlets. Visiting their center would connect our women with new opportunities to receive training at higher levels than DOB provides and give them an introduction to new ways to support to their small but growing businesses.On the day of our visit, all the women arrived at the meeting spot early and dressed in their best clothes. After some initial hesitation, the women moved freely between the stores at Alpha One. They interacted with the store clerks, looked at the Swarovski jewels and had fun riding up and down the elevators. At the Sewa Federation, they met the staff, saw the products that women like them had made and got new ideas for design and promotion.

The women also enjoyed being served by waiters in the food court—for some, it was the first time that a man had ever served them food.

Ramilaben captured the energy of the day best: “In the last forty years of my life, this is the first time that I have been around the city for myself—for leisure. This is the best day in a long, long time, spending time on my own, beyond the four walls and responsibilities of my home.”

Over the course of just one day, the 35 women in this Dialogue on Business class learned the ways their businesses might expand and gained the connections to make that happen.  I can’t think of a better way to have celebrated International Women’s Day 2013 – and to share it with you all during the Month of Microfinance!

It is easy to complain about our lot in life, but it is so much more rewarding and exhilarating to shape your own destiny. So let’s stop longing, and start doing. Let’s move forward in this New Year by taking small but steadfast steps in the direction of the life we’ve always wanted. Let’s be trailblazers in our communities just like these women — Bushra, Dilshod, Praveentaj, and Savitha, Manju and Sanguna. And why not? We have more to gain than to lose.

My final deliverable for the Dialogue on Business program is THIS VIDEO about the many inspiring women entrepreneurs I met this summer, I hope you enjoy it!

Signing off – Asya Tabdili!

But for collecting around 400 pounds of plastic, aluminum and plastic bags per week, María and her crew only make between 200,000 or 250,000 guaraníes (about $50 to $60). Shared between the four of them, this puts each person below Fundación Paraguaya’s 2012 extreme poverty threshold of $78 per month. Nilda, who works the waterfront on foot since her cargo motortrike broke down, earns even less.

A horse and cart used to haul Maria’s goods, during a re-shoeing in Santa Ana.

When they joined Fundación Paraguaya’s clientele as leaders of the women’s committee Mujeres Valientes  (Courageous Women) a few years ago, María and Nilda started up a line of business and a new source of income: making and selling jewelry and embellished flip-flops.

With a little start-up capital from Fundación Paraguaya, María and others were able to complete a month-long jewelry-making course and purchase supplies for their new business. Today, María, Nilda’s daughter Joanna, and a small army of adolescent relatives and neighbors, make the jewelry, and they all go to street fair at the edge of their neighborhood to sell it each weekend. Almost every item of jewelry goes for 5,000 guaraníes (about $1.25), and with so many hands, they can create a lot. They say it sells out fast, and they also make jewelry and flip-flops to order.

Embellished flip-flops. Second only to wrapping thermoses—for the cold water needed to make terere—in leather as Paraguay’s top contemporary craft.

On my last day in Paraguay, I visited María and Nilda one last time for an international craft day—and to share some ideas for, shall we say, synergy between their two businesses. The word of the day was ‘upcycling’.

Nilda María Achucaro, left, and María Dolores Valdéz.

María showed me how to make a flower from plastic petals, a circular base of perforated plastic, and stretchy thread, all bought from the suppliers in central Asunción’s Mercado 4. My hands seemed too clumsy, but she says it takes practice.

María at work.

Or it could have been that I was too busy thinking how to cut, form, and paint pieces of bottle plastic to make a wider variety of petals. When I gave up on the flower (María had made two in the meantime), we tried it, and everyone was pleased with the result. In exchange, I showed everyone how to make paper beads (by rolling a glue-coated triangle of magazine paper around a toothpick) and gave away earrings I had made by cutting and painting the designs found on plastic water bottles. We also talked about ways to re-work all the glass bottles out there. I didn’t even try the complicated task of beading a crocodile-shaped key chain, and my companions were a bit bemused by my specialty of making jewelry from worn-out bike parts.

The fruits of our labors: a flower ring, water-bottle earrings, a crocodile key chain, and a bike-parts bracelet.

In the end, I walked away having bought souvenirs aplenty and been given supplies to practice my flowers. María was eager to try it with homemade petals, and to incorporate the other techniques into her repertoire, expanding her offerings and lowering her costs at the same time. Still, she would be going back to Mercado 4 for some things (we didn’t make jump rings or earwires, for instance), not least because it’s fun and exciting, and browsing the huge bead stores makes her happy.

These questions are ones that can easily put people on a thinking spree, but for the loan officers of Fundacion Paraguaya, these are the questions that they ask every day to the women’s committees with whom they work. A typical committee is made of around 12-17 women, and with such a large group, you are bound to see all kinds of personalities and a unique life story for each female member.

During the first few loans, the loan officer is the mentor to the group: she motivates the women to be entrepreneurial, to value their own ideas, and to understand the steps and start thinking about how to start a business, among other things. But as time passes, and the women repay and renew their loans, and start and improve their businesses, a mentor emerges from within the group and takes on the role of the committee president. Usually the president exhibits more security thanks to a higher than average education or income and this helps her lead others in the same route.

 How to get Josefa to smile?

South of Asuncion in a town called Ita, at a sweltering 100 degrees F,  Lucia Avaros, the national coordinator of the Microfranchise program, is trying to convince Josefa Torales, a 51-year-old woman, to become more independent. Josefa says that she has never had the need to work since her husband provides her with everything that she needs. But Lucia asks her, ‘then why are you part of a committee in order to take out a loan?’ Josefa confesses that her husband doesn’t always pay all the bills on time and that he sometimes doesn’t earn enough or spends part of it on drinking. Lucia reminds Josefa that if she did have her own source of income, she wouldn’t have to worry so much about the bills and could instead pay them on time — and maybe even have some extra pocket-money for herself. ‘Isn’t there anything you want for yourself?’ Lucia asks Josefa.

‘I would like to go to the dentist, because I have lost some of my teeth and I cannot chew properly,’ Josefa replies.

(This issue is actually a very common problem in Paraguay. Fundacion Paraguaya has a poverty index that measures a number of indicators as to the quality of life of their clients, and Josefa’s situation is a common one: many clients’ main problems are health and infrastructure related. Specifically, lack of vision and dental care and the lack of kitchen and bathroom facilities).

But to Josefa’s reply, Lucia has another counter argument, ‘I have a business proposition for you, Josefa.’

Josefa and Lucia

Lucia shows Josefa a vision kit that is offered by Fundacion Paraguaya as a microfranchise opportunity to sell eye glasses.

The Vision Kit provided by Vision Spring and Fundacion Paraguaya.

The vision kit has turned out to have a tremendous impact on its owners. It isn’t the typical business that everyone gets into, so there is not too much competition for customers, and there is a large demand of people who need eyeglasses but who either do not have the money to go to the doctor or do not consider it a priority. Lucia trained Josefa on how to offer a visual exam to others and provide her customers with the eye glasses they need. Hopefully, Josefa will soon have the extra money that she needs to go to the dentist and smile again.

The first shipment came in July of last year, and Fundación Paraguaya loan officers have been busy distributing them to clients of the Womens’ Committees as one of the perks they receive beyond credit and support as borrowers. The two requirements for receiving a pair are to be part of a committee in good standing and to have a child under the age of 18 (who will receive the shoes). In addition, a pair went to every student at Fundación Paraguaya’s agricultural schools, where they are reportedly now high fashion, the thing to wear to parties and for visits home.

I first encountered this shipment of Tom’s in the trunk of Encarnación loan officer Liliana Lugo’s car as I went with her on her client visits. When I returned last week for a good-bye visit, I found all of the Encarnación team sporting Tom’s—a gift for the new year from Fundación Paraguaya.

The Encarnacion team all with their Toms shoes – these ones a gift from the Fundacion to its staff.

The shoes that are coming in March are destined for even broader distribution. Besides arranging everything for their arrival, Alcira is also coordinating with Fundación Paraguaya’s Junior Achievement program for young entrepreneurs, Junior Achievement’s Aprender a Emprender en el Medio Ambiente program (roughly, “learn to be an environmental entrepreneur”), and outside collaborators Fundación Moises Bertoni (a conservation and sustainable development foundation) and Fundación Dequení (an anti-poverty foundation) to get the shoes on the feet of more young people in Paraguay.

Having lived in the flesh in both of these very different realities,  I soon became passionate about social and economic development in emerging countries. I wanted to contribute in some way but first I needed to understand the base of the social pyramid. While I lived in Bogotá I volunteered in Techo building houses in the slums and did research with my professors during my undergrad searching for sustainable solutions to overcome poverty in Colombia through access to financial tools and education. That is how I came to learn of Accion…

Fundacion Paraguaya and Microfranchises

And now, here I am in Asunción working with Fundacion Paraguaya and having the opportunity to see the impact of equal access to financial tools  that have been changing lives throughout the country. Fundacion Paraguaya has been very creative in offering different microfinance services, one of them called microfranchises. My assignment is to evaluate the performance and satisfaction of microfranchises offered currently by Fundacion to women committees (for more details, see Esther’s recent post “A practical lesson in Microfranchising“).

Microfranchises offer a ready-made business in a box to low-income individuals who haven’t been able to start their own businesses from scratch. Hopefully if the microfranchise sticks it will give them the means necessary to bring them above the poverty line — the slowly changing of  colors from red, to yellow, to green, in Fundacion Paraguaya’s famous traffic light. (For more on the poverty indicators, check out Hannah’s post “Green Light means Go?” or even a post from 2011, “Measuring Microfinance Impact” by Aurelie).

My First Survey

My first survey was in San Lorenzo - a 30 minute bus ride from Asunción. I soon realized though, that it was hard to first get the women to be open to answering my questions. The great thing about group lending is that it fosters a tight-knit community and what one woman says replicates within the rest of the group. So unfortunately, that meant that what I got was 17 women answering exactly my questions the same as their leader/President did. The women in the committees also had to go back to work that day, and I had to go back to Asunción the next morning. I crafted a new strategy though, waking up extra early and went into San Lorenzo before the office had even opened! While the woman arrived one by one, for their weekly meeting, I was able to survey each woman separately. The more intimate environment allowed the women to open up more, and I got better answers! The women felt free to express their opinions, their frustrations about specific policies or group members and also the optimism they all shared that their loans and microfranchise kits purchased from Fundacion were able to produce.

What I learned is for another post – stay tuned!

First, what are the women’s committees? They represent a way of borrowing working capital that’s different from the way you or I might do it. Instead of borrowing individually and guaranteeing the loan with collateral or your credit rating, clients in Fundación Paraguaya’s women’s committees borrow together and guarantee the loan primarily with their solidarity as a group.

So then, what is solidarity? It is actually a deceptively simple concept: the degree of integration between separate social groups.

But in a complex society, it is obviously more complicated than that. The traditional – familial – source of solidarity still exists (even with Fundación Paraguaya setting limits on family relationships within a committee). Plenty of grown sisters, sisters-in-law, cousins, mothers and daughters join a committee and borrow together. But in addition to just familial relationships, there are many other reasons  women join a particular committee too, like friendship, home or workplace proximity, shared history (such as being displaced by flooding from the Yacyretá hydroelectric dam in Itapuá), shared work activities, and even shared experiences borrowing from Fundación Paraguaya in the past.

So, if solidarity refers to the relationships within the group, it still has to manifest itself somehow. In the case of the women’s committees, if for some reason a member can’t pay her loan installments, the committee (using its petty cash fund or, in worse situations, its group savings) steps up to help her with her payment. The group is responsible as a whole for each individual loan. The vision is beautiful: a woman gets sick and her co-borrowers dip into the savings they’ve built together (though group activities like street parties, artisan fairs, food sales, and soap-making) to pay the loan installment that she can’t. They may help her out in other ways as well, such as buying her a basket of groceries and pitching in around the house. At its best, this is what solidarity look like within a women’s committee at Fundación Paraguaya.

But, as you may suspect, results, and circumstances, vary. Some groups realize this ideal situation of solidarity on their own and upon encountering their first problem, while others struggle to figure it out, and even still some groups never find an answer. If payment problems go on too long, the group’s savings (and spirit) suffer until they can’t cover the gaps anymore.

And the reality of solidarity is that sometimes a faulty payment isn’t for a reason as innocent as poor health. Unfortunately,  a significant number of the individual defaults that Fundación Paraguaya records are due to falta de voluntad – a ‘lack of will.’ While this general term is used when a woman decides that the program just isn’t for her, it can also be used to cover broader and deeper reasons for non-payment, like a husband’s opposition to his wife’s borrowing or to her business pursuits.

While not all of these negative situations can be averted, there are steps that Fundación Paraguaya is taking to try to make the ‘ideal’ kind of solidarity prosper. Steps like making sure that each new committee knows the vision of functional solidarity and what it can do to make their group successful and re-setting the minimum and ideal numbers of women in a committee (larger committees have more resources to successfully handle problems). In addition, they are evaluating which group activities and other practices are most successful at stabilizing a troubled committee and using the power of Fundación Paraguaya’s clients’ Club benefits and discounts program, loan officers’ knowledge of their clients, and the network of businesspeople that the clients represent to offer help and training beyond what even the most successful groups offer—focused more on preserving a struggling client’s business than on her immediate, personal circumstances.

Savitha

Savitha is from Kerala and has a cashew production business. (Did you know that India accounts for over 50% percent of the world’s cashew production, processing and exporting!?)

She already had her business before she enrolled in the Dialogue on Business program, but Savitha says the Self-Management module increased her confidence, and other modules helped her manage her time more efficiently and  better measure and manage her expenditures.

Now, not only does Savitha have a more stable income through her stronger cashew enterprise, but she is also helping her community by employing fourteen other women who help her peel and clean the cashews. Below, Savitha enjoys a break with four of her employees.

Who knows, maybe the next bag of cashews you buy will have come all the way from Savitha.  And a good bag of cashews they will be — I speak from experience.

Manju

Manju runs her own lab. After having worked for someone else in a lab for ten years, she finally realized that she had the skills and courage necessary to be successful on her own and took the plunge to start her own business.  After receiving some additional training, Manju now conducts full body tests (blood, urine, stool, cough, etc.) and checks for various health problems such as diabetes and high cholesterol.  A majority of her customers are sent from a hospital a few miles away. This new endeavor has more than quadrupled her revenue!

Manju’s hopes for expansion include the purchase of new technology that can analyze blood faster and more efficiently, and a larger customer base. She is the first businesswoman in her family and you can see from from her smile and energy her pride in her remarkable accomplishments.

Suguna

Suguna – from Tamil Nadu – makes  floor mats out of recycled clothing pieces.  Not only is this an affordable alternative to purchasing the costly materials, but it is environmentally sound as well! How is that for a eco-friendly entrepreneur?

After taking out a microloan and finishing the Dialogue on Business program, Suguna felt inspired to buy her own mat making machine. She can now produce up to three mats each day and sells them to her neighbors and at the local market. But what is perhaps even more rewarding to Suguna than her increased revenue is that fact that she has grown to represent a role-model for women within her community and encourages them to open up their own businesses.

And there is even more where these come from. Check out some of my earlier posts – here, here and here – and stay tuned for a video that promotes the Dialogue on Business Program.

Through the Dialogue on Business program at Accion, Praveentaj was encouraged to increase her services and production as a way to increase her revenue and income. So, she decided to invest in a sewing machine as well as implement a tailoring component into her business. Quite a change from how she was working before — all by hand!

Since graduating from the DOB program, Praveentaj’s production and revenue have doubled! Most of her income is spent supporting her family of eight, who all live together in their one-bedroom home. As you can see below, her family members are all very proud of her work and had no problem helping Praveentaj show it off.

Here, Praveentaj is proudly holding a beautifully detailed Sari that she embroidered for one of her customers. In Hindi the word “Sari” means “Strip of cloth”. But just a strip of cloth they are not! This traditional clothing of India comes in so many different shades and patterns — three months in India and I did not see the same Sari twice! It is worn wrapped around the waist, with one end draped over the shoulder, which sometimes exposes a bare midriff.

While I was visiting Praveentaj and her proud family, at some point I had mentioned the word Mehndi (also known as Henna) and Praveentaj’s oldest daughter’s ears perked.  Within minutes she had returned from the local market, Mehndi in hand, a smile on her face, and a hand gesture that signaled, “Come, sit.” One empty Menhdi tube later and I couldn’t stop staring at her intricate creation in awe — and continued to do so the whole two hour bus ride back home.