Want to become our local partner?
Microcredit for Mothers's most important asset is our local microcredit partner network through which we reach the women in our target group. The partners are either local Micro Finance Institutions (MFIs) or smaller local non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in South Asia and South East Asia. These organizations have already established a relationship of trust with the local communities we intend to provide a microcredit to.
Via our partners we offer the women in the local communities a microcredit loan, accompanied with basic financial-, entrepreneurial- or female leadership training. As such, women learn to save part of their income, they become familiar with the basics of financial accounting, they are trained in several professions and finally, they are engaged in sessions on leadership.
Prerequisites for receiving one of our loans are a detailed Microcredit for Mothers approved project proposal (including name, age, type of business and loan usage per woman) as well as confirmation of the ability of the partner to provide quarterly key performance indicators to us. To ensure the latter, a visit by one of our program managers to the local partner is also a necessity before the start of a partnership. After all of the above mentioned elements are in place, our local partner receives the fund and disburses this as microcredit loans with interest to the women that were specified in the project proposal.
The interest of the microcredit loan is determined together with Microcredit for Mothers and is always in line with the market (microfinance-) interest rate of the country in question. The interest-income is used by our local partner organizations to finance labor and travel costs and any other costs associated with the specific project.
No collateral is involved in the microcredit loans distributed with our funds. The target group we want to reach, the poorest of the poor, is often not able to provide any. Instead, our partners may ask a group of women in a community to vouch for each other in order to get the loan, in accordance with the Grameen methodology. In some countries we work with so-called Self-Help Groups, who take on the loan as a group, thereby having the group members jointly share the responsibility for the entire group’s liability.
Our local partners meet with the women on weekly or monthly basis and collect loan- and interest payments. Loans which have been returned are redistributed to a (new) group of women according to the concept of a revolving fund. Our goal is to have every woman repay her loan within a year and to provide a woman with a maximum of three loans. At the moment, women usually repay their loans between ten and twelve months. We aim to have empowered the women to enter the national credit system by the end of these 3 loan cycle. At that time, barring specific exceptions, they will have built up enough collateral and/or credit history to qualify for the national system.
Are you working for a local MFI or NGO in South Asia and South East Asia? And do you want to know what the possibilities are to also become a partner of Microcredit for Mothers?
Please contact us with detailed information about your organization.
