By Alka Subramanian | ED/Founder
Power of Love's micro loans program provides business training, small loans and business monitoring and advice to poor women entrepreneurs in Zambia. Over the last eight years, our women entrepreneurs have built successful businesses that provide for their families, keep their children healthy, and in school. In addition, the women have started planning and saving for a better future for themselves and their families. Repayment rates in our program are in the range of 90% - extraordinary given the difficult circumstances of our loan grantees. We believe that these high repayment rates are the result of the business training provided prior to the loan. For more information on our micro loans program, please click here.
In April 2013, business training and loans were provided to 80 new women entrepreneurs. The women were identified and selected based on their willingness to learn to run a business and family circumstance. Eighty women participated in our four day business training program. The goal of the training is to equip the women with tools that will help them run a successful business so that they work towards self-reliance. This Mother's Day, give a gift of business training to a mom in Zambia so she can take care of her family and keep her children in school. A gift of $50 will provide business training to one mom entrepreneur in Zambia. To donate please click here.
Business Training Modules
Introduction: this part of the training is vital as it helps the women understand if they can be good borrowers. Most of the women have never been to school or had any formal training so even simple business concepts are new to them. All modules are supplemented with hands on exercises, and work sheets, real world examples and group discussions. This part of the training covers:
Market investigation - This is the second module and covers topics such as:
Buying - In module 3, the following concepts are discussed:
Business Concepts - This module covers:
Business Promotion - This module covers:
Simple Business Plan - The training ends with the women making a simple business plan for their proposed business. In addition, one afternoon is devoted to a discussion on social issues, followed by Q and A. This encourages the women to share their views, and ask questions so that they can learn about a variety of issues (ranging from repayments, to prevention of HIV, and running the business if a family member/child is sick and needs care) that are important to them.
At the end of the training, the women are eager to start their own business and start making repayments with earnings from their businesses. The women understand the importance of making loan repayments on time as after completion of repayments they are eligible for a second loan, and subsequently a third and final loan.
Conclusion
The business training provided to the loan grantees is popular with the participants and a critical factor that leads to high repayment rates.
Links:
Project reports on GlobalGiving are posted directly to globalgiving.org by Project Leaders as they are completed, generally every 3-4 months. To protect the integrity of these documents, GlobalGiving does not alter them; therefore you may find some language or formatting issues.
If you donate to this project or have donated to this project, you can receive an email when this project posts a report. You can also subscribe for reports without donating.
Support this important cause by creating a personalized fundraising page.
Start a Fundraiser
