MICRO ENTERPRISE,
MICRO CREDIT
RESOURCE DIRECTORY
-
Compiled by Cliff Thompson,
Member, Friends of African Outlet
VISION
Microeconomics
typically take an entrepreneurial approach to Appropriate Technology
("AT"), often starting with initially needed village AT, such as a
water pump, and proactively transforming the need into a small business that
provides a product or service at an affordable price-point,
to a market that typically is soon found to be sizeable. The resulting
microenterorise success story, and it's impact on the community, often follows a
pattern similar to the one recently told of Kenyans and the ApproTEC Appropriate
Technology "Super-MoneyMaker" water pump, which was reported as having
"... made 26,000 desperately poor Africans rich entrepreneurs, by the
standards of their homeland. Farmers whose annual income was less than $120 have
increased it to an average of $1,400. It has opened up their lives the way it
would alter that of an American who started making $110,000 a year instead of
$10,000.... Today 26,000 businesses there that use it generate $32 million in
new profits and wages annually. Their total income - more than $50 million - is
half a percent of Kenya's gross national product. In addition to employing
family members, these new entrepreneurs have created 18,000 jobs. Over the past
year, an average of 650 businesses started each month, 820 a month for the past
three months...Once barely able to feed their children, the new entrepreneurs
are now providing food for their families, sending their children to school,
building homes, obtaining health care, starting other businesses and becoming
role models...".
MICRO ENTERPRISE
Resource: Village
Earth -
The Peace Corps Appropriate Technology
Library
"
Village Earth...The
Consortium for Sustainable Village Based Development...
...A New Approach to Old Problems...In the 50’s there was the Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe. In the 60’s, The Peace Corps touched lives across the globe. These programs showed what dedicated external resources can do. Now is the time to empower people to meet their own needs, a time that calls for suitable access to the information resources of a new era...Village Earth is a program for the new millennium. It is based on evidence that lack of access to proper resources is the block to building a better life and that poverty is a symptom rather than the cause...Village Earth joins the forces of individuals and organizations, using the unique gifts of each to provide access to essential resources and to provide training to villages across the globe...Village Earth empowers people to achieve and sustain their hopes and dreams through their own efforts and actions.
The Village Earth Approach...Begins and Ends with Participation...Participation is the secret to human motivation. With the Village Earth approach, men, women, youth and elders are encouraged to play significant roles in improving their lives in partnership with both local and foreign organizations. This is enabled through...Training residents of all ages to assume responsible positions in their communities...Using scientific and local knowledge to generate environmentally responsible, socially sustainable technologies appropriate for the particular infrastructure and geography of each village project.
Working with public agencies to adapt resources to local needs...Encouraging private sector involvement in generating jobs, and creating lending market investment opportunity...Providing a global communication network to access sustainable resources...
New Enterprises can provide income for village residents...A local fisherman brings in his catch from a newly developed fish farm in Bangladesh.
Our Mission...To carry on sustainable human resource development around the globe in harmony with the local environment and culture...To help eliminate the erosive despair of poverty...To end the need for non sustainable dependant aid, through self reliant access to sustainable resources...To implement an entrepreneurial approach to sustainable village-based development...To ensure the environmentally safe & responsible development of the third and fourth world...To help realize that the basic resources required to create and sustain our lives belong to all human beings.
Members involved in the Village Earth program draw on over 40 years of development experience. Their contributions include: Assistance in establishing The Peace Corps...International commercial transactions and legal analysis National and international governmental relations assignments based in...Africa...
Appropriate Technology Resources...The Appropriate Technology Library...contains the complete text and images from over 1,050 of the best books on all areas of village-level and do-it-yourself technologies...over 150,000 pages! In use in over 130 countries by Peace Corps Volunteers, development and relief organizations, engineers, and missionaries...The Appropriate Technology Library contains the complete text and images from over 1,050 of the best books on all areas of village-level and do-it-yourself technologies...in the space it takes to store a shoebox. The AT Library gives you the knowledge to solve real-world problems such as; harvesting clean drinking water, making tools, growing your own crops, building and maintaining an irrigation system, preserving crops, reforesting a denuded watershed, starting a small fish hatchery, building a small-scale hydropower scheme, building and maintaining pumps, treating human and animal waste, utilizing solar energy, improving rural cookstove efficiency, constructing energy efficient structures...Subjects Covered in the AT library...Small Enterprises - 34 Books...Beekeeping - 9 Books...Small Industries - 38 Books...The Appropriate Technology
Library...Disk 24 Small Enterprises...Beekeeping...Small Industries...Disk 25...Small Industries Cont.
"
Disk
24 Small Enterprises...Beekeeping...Small Industries
Disk 25...Small Industries Cont.
Village Earth Appropriate Technology
Library
Village Earth
"...micro-enterprise employment. We provide the "hard technology"...design and engineering, equipment and parts supply, international delivery, training and installation. Additionally, we do print production, web site development and marketing consulting for sustainable development organizations...Reaching Further...Very small businesses called microenterprises are built on dreams and hard work, but the assistance they need is often in short supply. Nowhere is this more apparent than in parts of the world where equipment, transportation and reliable electricity and telecommunications can be hard to come by...(The Sustainable Village micro-enterprise)...web site was created to serve as a tool to foster new opportunities for rural entrepreneurs...Complementing the partnership between microenterprises and their supporting organizations, our mission is to forge new connections that will enable businesses to locate the resources they need, increase their customer base and expand their efforts into new places and markets. Using the power of the Internet, we can link your organization to people ready to help. If you need design plans for a piece of equipment or simply a book, we can find it. If you want to expand into new markets, we'll make the introductions and minimize your risk. If you're creating a product, we'll explore offering it to the world via our business-to-business network, web sites and consumer catalogs..."
Sustainable
Village Appropriate Technology Microenterprises
Sustainable
Village Microenterprise Slide Show
Resource:
ApproTEC Appropriate Technology
"...Martin
Fisher...and...engineers...new design...the Super-MoneyMaker, a one-person,
leg-powered irrigation pump...Fisher...sold the first $55 MoneyMaker micro-
irrigation pump to a Kenyan farmer in 1996...The pump and other mechanical
devices designed by Fisher have made 26,000 desperately poor Africans rich
entrepreneurs, by the standards of their homeland. Farmers whose annual income
was less than $120 have increased it to an average of $1,400. It has opened up
their lives the way it would alter that of an American who started making
$110,000 a year instead of $10,000.... Today 26,000 businesses there that use it
generate $32 million in new profits and wages annually. Their total income -
more than $50 million - is half a percent of Kenya's gross national product. In
addition to employing family members, these new entrepreneurs have created
18,000 jobs. Over the past year, an average of 650 businesses started each
month, 820 a month for the past three months...Once barely able to feed their
children, the new entrepreneurs are now providing food for their families,
sending their children to school, building homes, obtaining health care,
starting other businesses and becoming role models...".
ApproTEC
Martin Makes a Middle Class...Stanford grad Martin Fisher has gone low-tech in
search of solutions for Kenyan farmers -- San Francisco Chronicle
Resource:
GrameenPhone Ltd.
"...Hidden at the back of a pharmacy in rural Bangladesh, its rickety shelves piled high with medicines and condoms, is a thriving mobile phone business. The only sign of any kind of technology is a 20-metre bamboo pole, topped with what looks like a television aerial. But this is the workplace of Jamirun Nesa, one of 50,000 Bangladeshi women making a living as Grameen phone ladies, as they are known. Villagers flock to her phone booth in the region of Gazipur, two hours from the capital Dhaka, to use a mobile to call relatives, friends or business associates, paying for calls by the minute...Life-changing...Grameen phone ladies provide villagers with a vital link to services such as hospitals and to relatives both at home and abroad, in a country with the lowest number of phones in South Asia.,,The scheme was set up by one of Bangladesh's largest non-government organisations, the Grameen Bank...Every day dozens of people come to make or receive calls...Grameen phone ladies expect to earn more than US$1,000 a year, a far cry from the annual average income of
US$380...".
GrameenPhone Ltd.
"Mobile money spinner for women" -- BBCNews
MICRO CREDIT
"...When we started giving out tiny loans under a system which later became known as the Grameen Bank, we never imagined that one day we would be reaching hundreds of thousands, let alone two million, borrowers...Grameen Bank...Provides credit to the poorest of the poor in rural Bangladesh without any collateral. At Grameen Bank, credit is a cost effective weapon to fight poverty and it serves as a catalyst in the overall development of socio-economic conditions of the poor who have been kept outside the banking orbit on the ground that they are poor and hence not bankable...Microcredit is the extension of small loans to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. It has proven to be an effective and popular measure in the ongoing struggle against poverty, enabling those without access to lending institutions to borrow at bank rates, and start small business..."
Microcredit
About Grameen
Grameen Banker to the Poor
Grameen Banking for the Poor
Grameen Bank "The
16 decisions"
San Francisco Chronicle
Newspaper story
"Starting small...Bank gives seed money to help eradicate poverty"
Resource:
Village Earth "International Village Earth Sustainable Trust
(INVEST)"
"...Features...The Savings Group...Women who want to receive a loan first join or form a savings group consisting of 10-20 women. Each woman in the group contributes approximately 56 cents each month to the savings group...Loans...After six months in a savings group a woman is eligible to receive a small loan from the savings group’s kitty based upon her success at saving..."