From JetBlue’s “BlueBud” initiative to help small food companies to Patagonia’s funding of entrepreneurial ideas with its “$20 Million & Change” program, investing in small businesses and startups has been a trending initiative for many big businesses in recent years.
Through a new project WPF supports in Honduras, we will get to see firsthand if the two-pronged approach of providing both agricultural and financial assistance will have a synergistic, lasting positive effect on the alleviation of poverty.
Every quarter Whole Planet Foundation aggregates field metrics from our microfinance partners who are disbursing and collecting microcredit loans to people living in poverty.
Back in 2007, when Matt and Catherine O’Hayer started pasture-raising hens, their thoughts were never just on the birds in their care, but in using whatever means at their disposal to affect lasting change. Directly, that meant challenging long-held assumptions in the food business – that sustainable could not mean scalable, and vice versa. That challenged Matt to pioneer an entirely new on-shelf category in the egg set – pasture-raised – and disrupt an industry that had become moribund and commoditized.
Ten years ago, I embarked for a life-changing journey as an intern for Whole Planet Foundation with their microfinance partner, Grameen Bank, in Panajachel, Guatemala. I was 19 years old, a rising Sophomore at the University of Texas at Austin, and I had no idea what to expect. I came away completely inspired by the spark of entrepreneurship created by microfinance and found in each woman I met in Guatemala, which has led to a very interesting and crazy past 10 years as I have started my own ethical fashion business, Teysha.
Many microfinance organizations often talk about their success in terms of scale and big picture numbers: how many borrowers do they reach? How big has the loan portfolio grown? But MFIs need to answer a different set of questions to develop a more granular understanding of their impact on a household level.
Thanks to our microfinance partners around the globe who are working diligently daily to serve the world's poorest people, the average first microloan size we fund decreased over several fiscal quarters from $187 to $184 then $182 to now $180. What does this signify? That our partners continue to serve the unserved and that Whole Planet Foundation funds have created 15 million opportunities for low-income entrepreneurs to lift themselves and their family members out of poverty.
Crystal, a leading Georgian microfinance lender, has joined Business Call to Action (BCtA) with a pledge to provide access to finance – including loans and value chain services – to 30,000 new clients in rural areas of Georgia, as well as disperse 1,000 new loans for green/solar solutions and energy efficiency projects by 2020. As part of this commitment, Crystal will continue its record of fostering economic opportunity for farmers, women and micro entrepreneurs.
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