Change a Girl's Life Through Microentrepreneurship

Dear donors,

This last June you helped 20 new girls to start a business. Thank you again. These are the results:

First, the bad, we have one defaulter, Melanie, who is not anymore in the program. (She traveled out of the region) This is within a normal margin, defaulting is more rare every year, but it still happens.

The 19 other girls are all doing business, with and an average monthly profit of 34,000 frs, to put it in other words, they took your grant of about 56 dollars, put it to work and every month they generate about 64 dollars for their feeding and other family needs. It has been difficult to start as this was the first business they ever tried, especially now in rainy season, where the economic environment gets a bit more difficult. Profits in August (the heart of the rainy season) reduced by 24%.

It is necessary also to mention the volatile climate we are living in. The political problem in the Anglophone Cameroon remains unsolved, and violence is escalating. Our organization keeps calling for peace and dialogue between both parties. For the purpose of this report it’s important to understand that both strikes and government executive orders put business in halt, sometimes for as much as 4 days a week.

For a while we have been working with Tole Tea Credit Union, the major microfinance of the area. They have now agreed to share savings and Akwao data with us. Akwao is a daily savings practice common here, every business day you contribute a small sum and you will receive it all together at the end of the month. Even though majority of our girls don’t have an account in the Credit Union (only about 4 of the 77 girls’ active within Tole area), more than 60% take part in Akwao, with different sums. With this data, that we are still compiling, we can track exactly how much they have been saving (for some, even before we were working with them) this will allow us to have a better account of our impact -and also of the progress of the girls. We will share the results next month!

Last month we talked with Elizabeth, and we were pleading for support for her. We are so happy to say that, last minute, a donation of 250$ came through and she is going to be supported in the coming weeks with a business grant to scale-up her businesses. If you had anything to do with that, THANK YOU. With somebody like her, with a good track-record and proven experience, we are not looking at making sure she feeds every day, we are now targeting leaving poverty forever. This month we come to talk about Hellen, a mother of 5 from Nigerian origin that leaves in abject poverty in a small community in Limbe. We came to know her when she gave birth to triplets last August, and did not have any money to cover the medical expenses. Reach Out helped her with that and we also got to know more about her: she confessed not knowing anything about contraceptive methods and she had been doing business with a capital of about 20$, until she had to use the money and stopped. It’s a difficult case but we don’t’ shy away from those, and we know you don’t either. If you want to make she gets access to contraceptives, two business grants and school fees for her little children, follow this link.

One last thing before we go, last week we got the biggest donation ever for this program, 2000$!! We want to thank the ACCESS IMPACT foundation and also all the donors of this program, no matter the size, you all made it possible for us to be here.

Thank you for everything.

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