Who are you trying to help? What issue are you trying to address?

Guildance Community Development Foundation is involved in capacity building of rural poor women and youth group and extension of Revolving fund to them. We help the poor rural communities help themselves. Our mission is to empower and improve the poor people’s opportunities to access skills and revolving fund to eradicate the root causes of poverty on local communities so as to enable them attain self-reliance sustainability through setting up their individual viable/profitable micro business to generate income for their families.

Formal credit institutions e.g. commercial bank deem these rural poor women credit risks because they lack collateral consequently they have no access to the business loan to help their self employed activities grow. We plan to provide services to poor, low income women especially rural clients lacking access to other financial institution. So we have a distinct commitment to reaching the poor.

What is your project and how will it help?

Our Revolving Fund lending programme is based on group lending methodology where needy solidarity groups of 5 people or more form a borrowing group, but each person has her own business to start or run. The group members co-guarantee each other’s loans. There is no collateral, as the poor women and youth lack assets to stake for the loans. But the group members use peer pressure to ensure loan repayments are done on time and in full. A built in saving scheme enables the poor women and youth grasp the essence of savings and to experience a process of financial discipline for 1 to 2 months period.

Savings are handled and managed within and by group members and their group leaders. The groups are encouraged to open up Bank Accounts with commercial banks of their own choice to keep this savings, before they are transferred to us for custody. At least 15% of the required loan should be saved before loans applied for are processed and disbursed to the groups. Business counselling and training continues throughout the loan term provided by Group Mentors and Field Officers.

Our organisation teaches /trains the women groups how to make small savings every week and acquire financial discipline for a period of 4 to 8 weeks in order to accumulate 15% of the required loan. Credit will then be extended to the project beneficiaries. This savings therefore do provide some level of security to our program for the loans and are therefore caveated by our organisation during the loan period. Our repayment rates are 96%. Hence keeping in line with the best practices in the Micro finance Industry.

How can other people partner with you on your project?

Other people can partner as implementation partner, volunteers and provision of other services like monitoring and evaluation, financial management and training (capacity building).

Please detail the resources that you need.

The grant component we want funding for is primarily for providing training and logistics and Revolving Fund to rural, marginalized women borrowing groups.

See attachment for budget details and more information about the project.