Crowdfunding: A Cure to the World's Social Problems?

This blog was written by Lendwithcare lender, Jan Tchamani, and originally posted on DuCredit's website. It has been re-posted here with permission.

 

The Chitimba Women's Group, supported by Jan through Lendwithcare

Crowdfunding activity has been on the rise for a few years. With the rise of Kickstarter and other platforms, no sector benefits more fruitfully from crowd funding initiatives than the 3rd sector.

Micro-finance initiatives allow anyone to invest small amounts of money which make a huge difference to entrepreneurs and workers in the third world. Allowing them to provide a sustainable future for their families.

We asked one UK based donor, Jan Tchamani, one of AgeUK’s current internet champions, why she chose to give through crowdfunding and tell us a little about her experience of charitable giving through LendWithCare.

"It’s really important to me to do charitable giving, even though my means are quite limited. And, let’s face it, everyone has limits. Also, because I’ve been learning about sustainable development over the past few years, it’s also important to me to give in a way that’s responsible and environmentally-friendly.

Ever since I was at school, I’ve been fundraising. I think my first foray was running a sponsored music  day when I was a pupil at Stourbridge High School in the 1970s, raising funds for the Sunshine Children’s Home. I played the piano, as a soloist and accompanist, from 9am to 5pm, friends sang and played instruments, and I still remember what fun we had, and what a buzz it gave us when we handed over the money we had collected to the school secretary to send off.

When I was in my 30s, I was able to go overseas and do two years of development work in the Lobi tribal area of Burkina Faso, W Africa. I was teaching in a school for community leaders: mostly French language, since that was the language of administration, and the students had to be able to write letters and deal with officials. Other development workers were teaching well-digging or composting, treating ailments, organising conferences to bring local communities together, or getting the local languages written down in order to preserve them. Everyone was doing something useful. The Lobi are very dependent on subsistence farming, and therefore on the climate, so I saw at firsthand how important it is for charities who get involved in developing countries to be aware of the right way and the wrong way to intervene. I’m satisfied that Lendwithcare know what that right way is: small amounts lent, rather than given, and to people who have a solid business development plan.

I’m no longer able to travel abroad and help, but doing my bit is still very important to me. Although my means are modest, I’m still so much better off than some of the entrepreneurs the organisation is helping. I tend to go for individuals, and I tend to favour farmers who are trying to cultivate more efficiently, and get to a point where they can employ people and have enough produce to spare to sell it at local markets so, for example, they can afford to improve the house they live in, install a simple irrigation system, or pay for their children’s education.

I’ve been with Lendwithcare – run by CARE International UK – for about a year. I think I saw an ad for them on Facebook, and followed up. Lendwithcare.org offers a way of giving online that provides microfinance for entrepreneurs in developing countries. The entrepreneurs concerned have to have a strategic development plan, and the amount they want to borrow is calculated exactly, to the nearest pound.

Lendwithcare gives you plenty of information about the individual entrepreneur on which to base your choice, including a photograph. You can start with a loan as small as £15, and you can see how near their borrowing target the person has got. You get a notification email when they’re 100% funded. There’s also a repayment schedule. Nobody I’ve lent to has ever failed to pay back the scheduled monthly amount, and they often pay back faster, which goes to show how effective the borrowing is in improving their situation.

I get monthly emails from Lendwithcare – they’re great at communicating, but they don’t bombard me, and they never use emotional blackmail. In fact, their emails are always the first I look at when I open my inbox, because they’re always positive: “X, whom you helped, is now fully funded!”, a thank you, or news that all of my £15 has come back and I can reinvest it. Looking back over 2014 and the number of people I managed to help with my £15 gives me such an amazing feeling of being connected to people in other parts of the world – people who are really trying to improve their lives, and the lives of their local communities. The minimum investment amount of £15 is so small, really – the price of a simple pub lunch for two, or a couple of cinema tickets."

Register on Lendwithcare today and join Jan in supporting entrepreneurs in developing countries work their own way out of poverty.

Guest blog | You don’t have to wait for Christmas!!

This blog was originally posted on Richard Kemp's blog and has been re-posted here with his permission.

Pictured above is Ghulam Qadir who has a recycling business in Pakistan

I have to admit that I am not an easy person to buy things for at Christmas and birthdays. I am lucky that I can afford to buy things that I need and have very few things that I want to buy on top of that except for stamps (I am a stamp collector).

So I always present a challenge. However my ever resourceful younger daughter Rachel, currently the Lady Mayoress of Liverpool, knows my foibles and my interests and is a dab hand at whizzing around on her computer looking for things.

In the past she has bought me things like goats from Oxfam which I have appreciated but it felt a bit sterile. I like being involved with things. This year she found a perfect present when she gave me a voucher for Lendwithcare. In this she combined two of my interests.

Professionally I used to be a regeneration adviser helping people set up programmes to help small business in some of the most deprived parts of England and in places like Turkey.

Politically I represent the UK on a number of international local government bodies and have had the opportunity to visit villages and towns in Africa to see at first hand the hand to mouth existence that so many of the people of Africa and similar areas face.

From the start I was delighted with the gift and within a couple of days invested most of it. I have since put two more small amounts in and intend to give small amounts on a regular basis.

I like thinking about which countries and people to invest in. I don’t put money into retail businesses but prefer to put them into things like recycling, food production and farming. I like the feedback that I get from Lendwithcare and to see the relatively small amounts dribbling in monthly. This means that I know that Lendwithcare is investing well although I do expect that sometimes it will not work out and the investment will disappear.

I have currently made two investments in Pakistan and one each in Benin and Cambodia. Two of the investments are with men and two with women.

To me this is what Christmas is all about. I don’t need another tie and although I will always eventually eat another bar of chocolate doing some small things for people in far greater need than I have ever experienced gives me a small glow of satisfaction. So thanks Rachel for leading me to Lendwithcare. You know what Santa can bring me next year don’t you!?

But you don’t have to wait for Christmas. If you go onto their website you can sign up and start lending straight away  http://www.careinternational.org. Alternatively ring them on 0207 091 6014. Lend some money, do some good and have a pleasurable learning time as well. You could even become a Lendwithcare angel – probably the only chance that I will ever get of acquiring a pair of wings! If you come from Greater Liverpool you can also join a group and see what other members (there are currently four of us) are doing and investing in. I don’t want to urge you on too much but Manchester has a bigger group than Liverpool – a situation I would really like to see rectified!!

Guest blog | Lending: the new giving?

This blog was originally posted on Tim Bishop's definitelymaybe blog and has been re-posted here with his permission. 

 

Vietnamese hill tribe handicrafts © CARE / Tim Bishop

I live in Saigon, Vietnam, and it’s hotting up once more as we approach the muggiest time of the year.

Luckily, for me, this week I have been in Hanoi and luckier still, yesterday spent the day visiting local hill tribe communities about 180 kms north west of the capital. Not only did the mercury drop down lower for the day, as we snaked our bus round the mountains through wispy clouds and potholed roads, but we were privileged to meet incredibly talented individuals, tucked away as they are from the life of urban Hanoians, and cut off from the collective consciousness of the world outside Vietnam.

 

The objective of the visit was as part of an expansion of an initiative in the UK that CARE International have built over the past four years, called Lendwithcare.org.

Local Hill Tribe Community © CARE / Tim Bishop

The brainchild of CARE’s former marketing director, Lendwithcare set out to establish an online micro-lending community within the UK, whose members (or “lenders”) are able to loan money to individuals (“borrowers”) in the developing world, to help establish and grow micro-enterprises and small businesses.

The borrowers repay the lenders on a monthly basis, and once the loan is fully repaid the lender can re-loan the same amount back into the system, and onto a new borrower.

This lending cycle can continue for years, and support multiple borrowers.

Lendwithcare now has 17,000 lenders supporting nearly 8,000 borrowers in eight countries (Zambia, Malawi, Pakistan, Togo, Benin, Cambodia, Philippines and Ecuador) and the intention is to expand further.  65% of those lending have so far gone on to make additional loans.

Handicraft Group - painting in beeswax © CARE / Tim Bishop

The initiative offers transparency - as a lender, you can track the progress online of the borrower in which you invest your loan – and also maintains an appeal to a range of audiences (in my family not only did I sign up to make a loan, but my father did also, as did two other family members of ours, both now in their 90′s).

The appeal is simple: Lendwithcare makes your money work very effectively and it also helps include up until now some of the billions of people in the world who are simply looking for the same things in life as everyone else.

As anyone who has ever worked will testify, there are times for all of us when the requirement of a loan to help us move forward are too pressing to ignore. Growing up in the UK, I borrowed money from the bank to purchase numerous things, and the process to do this was typically quite straightforward (often too simple, but that point would require a separate post on the ways and wherefores of the banking system in the UK).

 

Duck and cow breeding © CARE / Tim Bishop

 The plain reality for so many people living in Vietnam, and elsewhere, is that accessing any form of loan – even from family members – is often impossible, and typically those loans on offer might only be obtainable from individual (black market) money lenders, operating with high interest rates.

For the groups I met yesterday, most were made up of women, and they were fortunate enough to be receiving loans from a Hanoi based micro-finance institution (MFI), specialising in lending to remote communities.

And it is via MFIs through which Lendwithcare operates.  MFIs loan money to individuals, usually at favourably low interest rates, however many often lack access to regular and affordable capital, to be able to actively plan long term.

Through Lendwithcare CARE seeks to overcome this issue, offering MFI partners interest free capital as well as giving them small grants in order to cover administration costs, and support staff training.

It is CARE’s aspiration to help grow the outreach of MFIs in a way that also promotes positive social outcomes for borrowers. Which means providing loans not just to grow small businesses (such as breeding chickens and ducks, or selling handicrafts) but also loans to help install toilets and water pipes, loans to carry out house repairs, and loans to help train people in business development skills.

Every borrower we met yesterday could have added further items to their wish list.

Whilst micro-finance does not solve all the world’s problems, what it can do is help address the inequity of the current paradigm.

When I lived in Uganda in 1996, teaching English, the needs and wishes of those in the village I stayed were no different to what I saw and heard yesterday here in Vietnam (itself accredited with being a “middle income” country and economically vibrant after thirty years of positive growth).

In so many ways the world has changed since 1996.  Many of the hill-tribes in Vietnam have mobile networks, many have learnt new farming techniques to improve their yield, or had access to new markets to sell their handicrafts.  More children are attending primary school.

But much remains unchanged.

For many countries in a similar situation to Vietnam, economic growth has not been inclusive of all, and has not addressed issues of gender, nor exclusion for many people from accessing markets, information and resources.  As we saw again yesterday, women still do the brunt of the domestic and the labour work, and access to clean water and sanitation exists only for those households in each commune fortunate enough to have them.

So, is lending the new giving?

Time will tell.  Until then, however, why not take a look yourself at the Lendwithcare.org website today, and become a part of the potential answer.

Loans can be given as a gift voucher to a friend or family member, who can choose which entrepreneur they would like to support. The entrepreneur uses the loan to help grow their business, and later pays the lender back. The lender can either withdraw the money and keep it, or lend the same money to another entrepreneur.

Gift vouchers range from £15 and are available in various designs, which can be sent via email, downloaded and/or printed. They are available at www.lendwithcare.org/gift_vouchers.