Change a Girl's Life Through Microentrepreneurship

“This has helped me to solve my needs without any difficulty. The first thing I bought with the profits was a gas bottle for the house. By the end of the year I want to have something big, buy in large quantity and have more costumers.” Prenet, who has moved from local markets to be a trader in Douala.

Dear Donors,

 Our biggest disbursement ever, our most successful batch of girls ever.

Thanks for supporting us so much, we are closing the year and the 20 girls supported in June 2017 were evaluated and 16 of them selected for more support. (3 traveled out of the community and one got a job in the capital). We also gave grants to 3 older beneficiaries who are aiming now at completely removal from poverty. You might see some men in the picture, we took the disbursement ceremony as an opportunity to give 3 prizes for another project in the community, Innovation Challenge.

“I want to thank those who supported me, I pray for them every day and they should pray for me too, because they have planted a seed in me. I will not disappoint them.” Esther, receiving her third grant.

We will give you more details in the next report. For now we want to share with you the Summary of the year, extracted from our Annual Report that we are just drafting.

Also, today is Giving Tuesday, so spread the word, it´s a great day to give! Moreover, anybody signing for a recurring donation (those are the donations you make every month) will be matched by 100%!!.

 Achievements:

• 20 Girls were supported with grants of 30.000 FCFA and joined the program. (Level 1 beneficiaries).
• 28 Girls were supported with grants of 50.000, FCFA respectively after successfully managing a business. (Level 2 beneficiaries).
• 03 Girls were supported with grants of 100,000 (2) and 200,000 (1) (Level 3 beneficiaries)

• Bookkeeping implementation remains high, at 90%
• 83% of girls supported since 2012 are currently self-employed or employed.
• Average Monthly Profits of beneficiaries this 2017 are 2.22 times bigger than in 2014-2015, and 1.3 times bigger than in 2016

Challenges:

• High mobility of beneficiaries complicates execution and follow-up.
• Shortage of office cameras limits capitalization
• The experience with the Mutual Health Organization was not satisfactory. When attempting to use the insurance, beneficiaries were blocked. This is consistent with several other members complaints, the Mutual Health Organization is facing a crisis and can´t be considered a functional, stable partner. An official complaint will be presented to the Ministry of Health and REO will stop purchasing insurance from the Organization.
• We have made great strides at poverty alleviation but we are still facing a ceiling when it comes to complete break out of poverty and economic empowerment. The department needs to explore solutions to provide higher amounts of capital to be used at the right time and pace.

So this is what we did with your money so far, much more is coming, 2018 is going to be big. And those are our challenges. As you see, no Health Insurance again, it was sad, but we will keep attempting to tackle that problem in the future. Next year we are looking at scaling-up full removal from poverty, hope you stay with us!

P.D: Remember, anybody signing for a recurring donation has a 100% bonus with him! This promotion is valid until the end of the year!!

P.D2: last month we promised data on daily savings. Well, we got the data from the Credit Union but the sample was smaller than we thought. We did use the savings general data to quantify the impact of the current political crisis. In case you are interested: from September 2016 (before the crisis started) and September 2017. The number of users of daily saving practices has reduced by 27%, total summed up savings has reduced by 37% and average savings of a user by 14%. We are in the middle of an economic depression, but the growing profits of our girls are going against this tendency.

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