1,000 Microloans for Rural Women in East Africa

We wish all of you a very happy and healthy New Year! Your support of Women’s Microfinance Initiative during the past year has been instrumental in fostering healthier and happier lives for our rural women and their families. With your donations, our lending and financial education program has reached over 5,000 women and their families. Since our inception in 2008 we’ve made over 15,000 loans totaling nearly $2,500,000. And most important, we’ve been able to continue our track record as a high performance/low overhead organization. Our feet on the ground are the ladies in the loan program who provide the local administrative infrastructure. There are no high priced consultants involved in WMI – only high quality, village-level staff members who have taken ownership of the program and are vested in its success.

We think you will enjoy this letter from one of our Uganda borrowers. She lives in a very rural area near the South Sudan border. In her own handwriting she tells her “Successful Story.”

I am ______. I have join WMI program in April 2013 in Attiak sub-county Amuru district and get a training for two days then after they have given me a loan of 300,000 shillings (about $150) I set with my husband and make a plan for the business to start. We have started selling rice, beans, cooking oil, onion, sorghum. Each day we sell we count the money together then save 5,000 in our cash box. Some times 10,000. So now as I take I have bought two goats, save 500,000 in my account. I have my house budget. There is no blind spending, no (much) depending on my husband, I am now able to assist the family well in term of feeding, dressing, sickness, school fee, and even sometime buying airtime for my husband. So I thank WMI program so much because they have help me. I was in slackness. They have remove me from the slackness and put me in the light where by I am now a wise woman.