Sure, our economy's grim, but consider this: In Haiti, 80 percent of the population lives under the poverty line and two-thirds lack formal jobs. Altering such circumstances is the mission of the Chiapas Project, a local micro-finance group that raises money for loans to impoverished women in Latin America. While the organization has been successful in reaching families who live on $2 per day, staffers are redoubling efforts to help those who make less than $1 per day.
"Now the goal is to develop ways to reach the poorest of the poor," President Tricia Bridges tells Unfair Park.
One approach is referred to as Microfinance Plus, which means issuing grants to improve the health and education of poor communities so that those living on $1 a day have access to enough food and education to be able to start a self-sustaining small business.
"We realize, 'Well, we gave her a loan to start a business, but how can she take out a loan if she can't write her name? Let's teach literacy,'" Bridges says, explaining that the new trend is to give grants for projects like health education or literacy classes. "If I have the flu, I'm not going to get up and go to work. If these women are sick, they're not going to go make their shawls and make their payments."
Sam Daley-Harris, whose RESULTS Educational Fund helped popularize the practice of giving small business loans to poor people who wouldn't qualify for conventional ones, talked about creative ways to strengthen communities and increase loan repayment rates Thursday night at SMU's Meadows Museum. Speaking about the practices of micro-finance pioneers like Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunas, he told of one lending group in Africa that discovered most business owners struggling to repay their loans had a family member in the hospital.
That spawned a rare collaboration with local mission hospitals that led
to a non-traditional group insurance plan of sorts, and the problem was
solved. It was this sort of "creative rule-breaking" that allowed Yunus
and others like him to put microfinance on the map as a powerful
development tool for poor countries, Harris said, and only by
continuing to come up with similarly renegade solutions will we be able
to take poverty eradication to the next level. "People say, well, why
would you give loans to thieves?" he said, "But someone figured out how
to do it." Many of the successful business owners in Africa, Asia and
Latin America who got started with funding from a microloan began as
beggars or criminals, he said, because the terms of the loans that were
available to them before made it impossible for them to make a profit.
Providing people with a way to survive outside of begging and
crime is precisely what moved Chiapas Project board member and donor
Anne McGee-Cooper to start putting money toward micro-loans on
holidays. "Our family started giving loans as gifts -- that way you
don't buy into materialism and all the ways it's undermining our
planet's health," she says. "This could be the solution to wars and
terrorism."
Pioneering new ways of fighting poverty and
hunger often means working around traditional principles and
institutions, Harris said. He pointed out that when asked about his
strategy, Nobel-Prize winner Yunus -- a friend and mentor to Harris --
would say that he looked at big banks and did the opposite of whatever
they did (if they loaned to the rich, he loaned to the poor, if they
loaned to men, he loaned to women, and if they required collateral, he
didn't).
As part of his talk, "Microloans to thieves, and
other revolutionary acts that demand championing," Harris complimented
the Dallas audience for being part of the fight against poverty. "I
want to acknowledge this group for being a community that holds a
positive vision when there are so many negative ones," he said. "What's
unique about Dallas compared to other cities is you don't have to
reinvent anything -- you can actually join a [local micro-finance]
organization."
The Chiapas Project has since 2003 collected
more than $4 million for small loans to female business owners in Latin
America. As of this time last year, Dallas had more donors than any
other city to the local group and the Washington, D.C. based Grameen
Foundation. Bridges says donations have held steady despite the
recession ("There's a sense that these women living in huts with dirt
floors are depending on us, so if people have to cut out a couple of
nice dinners, it's worth it," she says), and stresses that she and her
organization are always exploring new research and new ways to make
each investment dollar go further.
Brian Weinberg, a recent SMU
graduate and Chiapas Project volunteer who in addition to organizing
last night's event at SMU launched a cell phone recycling program that
raises money for microcredit, says he and others can learn plenty from
Harris, whose D.C.-based group in January hit its target of reaching
100 million poor families around the world with microloans.
"He
and his campaign are setting goals for the entire industry -- kind of
like the Millennium Development goals," Weinberg says. "When he talks
about putting poverty in museums, he's serious."
