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Seattle Microfinance Nonprofit Looks Beyond Loans to Education
Global Partnerships , a Seattle-based nonprofit that provides microfinance to the developing world, has shifted its strategy in recent years to expand its focus beyond the traditional microloans that it started with 17 years ago. ...
- Region
- Latin America
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Peru Has Best Environment for Microfinance in Global Ranking
Lima, Oct. 11 (ANDINA). Peru has finished atop the Global Microscope on the Microfinance Business Environment 2011 for a third straight year, buoyed by an excellent legal framework, sophisticated regulators and a government commitment to use microfinance to expand financial access to the poor. This annual study, prepared by The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), ranks the business environment for microfinance in 55 countries and provides a perspective on both country-sp...
- Region
- Latin America
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Banmujer: Benefitting Over 300,000 Venezuelan Families Since 2001
One of Venezuela’s most important public institutions created to assist impoverished women through micro- credit lending celebrated its 10-year anniversary last week. Banmujer first came into existence on September 21, 2001 as government run bank with the specific purpose of funding socio-productive business initiatives for women in particularly dire economic conditions. Since that time, the women’s bank has granted more than 138 thousand micro-credits, benefiting over 300,...
- Region
- Latin America
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Global Partnerships Makes First Investments in Colombia
Global Partnerships (GP), a nonprofit social investor based in Seattle, Washington, and Managua Nicaragua, announced today that it has made its first loans to two partner organizations based in Colombia: Fundación Amanecer and Contactar. With the addition of these two partners to its portfolio, GP is supporting the work of 33 microfinance organizations and cooperatives in eight countries in Latin America, including Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua an...
- Region
- Latin America
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Loan Ranger
On a hot summer day in Manaus, Brazil, Diana Taylor, the former banking superintendent of New York and longtime companion of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, was strolling through a slum. A city of about two million in the middle of the Amazon, Manaus is where the Boston-based microfinance group Acción International started an ambitious lending operation in February, and Taylor, who is chairwoman of the group’s board, had flown down with a delegation...
- Region
- Latin America
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Grameen Foundation and USAID Providing $3 Million for Peruvian Microfinance Institutions
Grameen Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) today announced that they are jointly providing a $1.5 million credit guarantee to the Peruvian savings and credit cooperative Cooperativa de Ahorro y Credito (ABACO) to support approximately $3 million for local currency financing to two socially-focused Peruvian microfinance institutions (MFIs). Peru has an established microfinance sector, with mature institutions having relatively easy access to internationa...
- Region
- Latin America
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In Pockets of Booming Brazil, a Mint Idea Gains Currency
SILVA JARDIM, Brazil-After school and on weekends, Carlos Leandro Peixoto de Abril sells ice cream made by his grandmother from a stoop alongside the family’s cinder-block home. Instead of Brazilian reais, though, the 11-year-old prefers payment in capivaris-a local currency emblazoned with the face of a giant rodent. Bills in hand, Carlos then heads to a local grocer and buys ingredients, at a special discount, for another batch of grandma’s goods. The capivari circulates...
- Region
- Latin America
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A Lesson in Social Entrepreneurship: Fundacion Paraguaya
Recently, I interviewed Martin Burt, founder and CEO of Fundación Paraguaya , an NGO devoted to the promotion of entrepreneurship among the world’s poor. A pioneer in microfinances and youth financial literacy in Paraguay, Burt developed one of the world’s first financially self-sufficient agricultural schools for the rural poor - creating a radical new model for education. In ad...
- Region
- Latin America
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