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Introducing Micro-Loans As RIPPLE Africa develops, we find that everything we do is inter-related. For example, if you are encouraging people to plant trees, this will have an impact on agriculture. Education is important for people to understand environmental issues and health issues, etc. The future for countries like Malawi cannot be just reliance on aid. Aid in the past just has not worked, and people in Malawi are poorer now than they have ever been. Our philosophy of providing a hand up rather than a hand out means that we are trying to enable Malawians to help themselves. In order to do this, there are two components that are vital. The first is money and the second is food. To generate food and money, you really need business and trade but the rural Malawians have no money to get started and, invariably, the sort of businesses that they can start up are to do with farming of one type or another. |
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We have recently read a very inspiring book by Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel prize winner who started the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (the book is called "Banker to the Poor"). With the ideas from this book, RIPPLE Africa is now venturing into new areas (for example, fish farming and bee-keeping), and we believe that by providing micro-loans for groups of people enables them to establish viable businesses. If RIPPLE Africa is to loan this money, we need to be assured that the loan and interest will be paid back to re-invest in future projects. So what we have decided to do is to establish some pilot projects to learn and understand these businesses so that we can give valuable guidance to people who take out loans in the future. We need to raise funds for... |
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Micro-Loans Video |
