by Rachel Turner

 In a recent CGAP blog post, the writers state, “The opportunity exists for financial services providers to design products and delivery channels that allow women to seize opportunities and thrive beyond what current financial options make possible. For example, savings and loan products could be tailored to women’s livelihoods to enhance their productivity and increase their incomes. As women’s income increases, financial services providers could offer financial products that enable women to diversify into new livelihoods with further earning potential.”

The authors were specifically talking about cultivating opportunities for women in agriculture. I’m proud to say that I work for an organization that is consistently taking this idea to heart. In November 2016, Friendship Bridge launched a pilot program–Women’s Agriculture Credit & Training.

Seeing how entrenched agriculture is in the Guatemalan culture and workforce (39%), we saw the need to create a product that provides agriculture clients access to new markets through technical training and credit products that meet the unique needs in the agriculture sector. Many of our clients are subsistence farmers with low harvest yield and value. Without the tools to produce more and sell their yield, these clients are often unable to find solutions to poverty.

Through one-on-one training, group workshops, and product growth demonstrations on parcels of land, our agriculture team has quickly grown this program to serve 469 clients in the department of Quiché. Now, the program is expanding to the department of Sololá.

“The greatest challenge has been helping clients modernize their agriculture practices instead of only following ancestral practices passed down through generations,” said Agriculture Project Coordinator Marco Monroy. “We’ve also begun involving the husbands in trainings since couples work the fields together. I enjoy this project because by teaching agriculture science we can see drastic changes – improvements – in the agriculture sector of Guatemala.”

At Friendship Bridge, we are consistently looking to provide products and services through our Microcredit Plus program that are tailored to each client’s individual level of development along her growth path to empowerment. The Women’s Agriculture Credit & Training program is just one example of the exciting initiatives our team is implementing.

Rachel Turner is the Global Communications Manager for Friendship Bridge. Having worked and lived  throughout the world, she now calls the foothills of the Rocky Mountains home.

Summer has so much to offer. Bonfires. Ice cream. Pool days. Vacation.

This year, we want to help prep you for the best summer of your life! Check out our popular artisan items to aid your travel and provide great conversation starters.

Through Friendship Bridge’s Artisan Market Access, we can provide access to hand-made, high quality, items from our clients in Guatemala.

 

More about Friendship Bridge’s Artisan Market Access …

Friendship Bridge currently serves over 4,000 artisan clients. Through surveys and client research, many of these women have expressed the need to access new markets to sell their products and bolster their income. However, many of these artisans are isolated by language and geogra­phy, and many lack the business skills to thrive in the modern marketplace.

Friendship Bridge’s Artisan Market Access program provides artisans with trainings designed to ready them to access new markets – in particular, the global market. Trainings focus on topics such as quality of raw materials, buyer expectations, and tastes and preferences of the North American market. Artisans are also trained about product pricing to ensure they receive a fair wage for their work.

In one year, artisan clients doubled their income and their employees to meet the new demand.

by CHRIS DUNFORD / CARMEN VELASCO

Partially reprinted from Next Billion Blog

Seventeen years ago, one of us compared the successful balance of financial sustainability and poverty reduction in microfinance to the Holy Grail – many searched for it, some claimed unconvincingly to have found it, and even more gave up on it as a beguiling myth. Not much has changed since then. Or so it may seem. Sophisticated research in the past decade has deepened doubt and strengthened skeptics. Yet practitioners, responding to moral imperative, societal need and market opportunity, keep trying to reach and serve people living in poverty. And many millions of them keep using microfinance. Why do they use it if it doesn’t help them? Do some practitioners do a better job of helping them than others do? How would we know?

Faced with this puzzle, a group of us set out in 2010 to find some straightforward way to identify the practitioners who are successful (and, by implication, those who are not so successful). But what does “success” look like? How would we know it if we see it? Depending solely on sophisticated (and expensive) research studies is not practical for sifting through a large number of practitioner institutions. So we asked: What are the obvious and essential practices of a “successful” practitioner that logic says should help clients achieve lasting, positive change that reduces or even eliminates poverty from their lives? If the logic is right, we should be able to quickly assess the “pro-poor performance” of various practitioners of financial services for poorer people.

The most obvious practice is to actively try to reach and serve people living in poverty. Of course! We can’t aspire to “lift people from poverty” if they are not living in poverty to start with. This became our Pro-Poor Principle No. 1.

The next most obvious practice is to design and offer products/services specifically to serve poorer people. This often requires segmentation of a diverse clientele to identify poorer clients and make sure at least some of our products/services are designed to address their particular wants, needs and constraints. This became our Pro-Poor Principle No. 2.

Less obvious, perhaps, is the need to investigate how the lives of participating clients actually are changing. This requires tracking the progress of clients (at least a representative sample) to understand how they use the products/services and how this use correlates with positive changes in their welfare (however the practitioner defines “positive change”). Such impact evaluation – bearing in mind that correlation points toward, but never by itself confirms, causation – serves more than donors/investors. It also provides vital feedback to the practitioner seeking to correct, improve and innovate products/services. This basic good business practice is our Pro-Poor Principle No. 3.

Armed with these three Pro-Poor Principles, we brought together microfinance rating agencies and other technical experts to design and test with us an assessment tool and process to tell us how completely a practitioner institution is adhering to the three principles. The more complete the adherence, the more likely the institution is truly helping people lift themselves from poverty.

To beta-test this tool and process, we commissioned three social rating agencies to assess nine institutions around the world, giving each a score composed from the answers to a number of questions about essential practices. We found that scores fell into four clusters along a continuum of potential scores.

Even the most committed pro-poor institution is on a long journey toward “perfect” pro-poor performance and will never fully arrive. A threshold of “compliance” anywhere short of perfection would be arbitrary, so we decided it is better to recognize institutions as having arrived at milestones along a Pro-Poor Pathway. The four clusters of our beta test served to establish four milestones – Aspirant, Emerging, Achiever and Leader – ranging from those just getting started on the journey to those who have traveled a long way already and serve to inspire and encourage institutions further back.

These concepts and instruments offer the opportunity to create a global “trust mark” for anti-poverty action. There are many trust marks on which consumers, investors and regulators have come to depend for identifying quality in products and practices; for example, home care products, fair trade coffee, building design and forest products. We could have a trust mark for pro-poor performance that would build and support confidence in the pro-poor claims of development practitioners and service providers of many stripes, not just financial services.

Given the experience base of our group, we started with financial service providers in developing countries. We call ourselves Truelift (as in truly helping people lift themselves from poverty). So far, 24 microfinance providers reaching tens of thousands of clients have been assessed and recognized, each at one of the four Truelift milestones. In April, Truelift announced that Fundación Paraguaya in Paraguay and Friendship Bridge in Guatemala have reached the Leader milestone, the most advanced stage along the Truelift Pro-Poor Pathway. This recognition is based on the results of Truelift-licensed assessments conducted in late 2016 by MicroFinanza Rating.

Fundación Paraguaya and Friendship Bridge are only the second and third institutions to achieve the Leader milestone in Latin America and only the third and fourth in the world, respectively. This rarity reflects the difficulty of achieving the Leader milestone, but these institutions show that it can be done! The rarity also reflects the nascent stage of development of Truelift as a global trust mark signifying commitment to positive and enduring change for people affected by conditions of poverty…CLICK HERE FOR MORE

 

reprinted from the Golden Transcript

My name is…Svetlana Yamanova.  I’m 47. I was born and raised in Russia and I came to the U.S. to attend school. I enjoy how free people are here. Americans have an I-can-do-it mentality.

I studied international relations and graduated from the University of Denver in 2003. I moved to Wheat Ridge that year.

I enjoy the outdoors. Where I’m from in Russia, we don’t have that kind of culture. That’s why I love Colorado and living so close to the mountains.

I volunteer with Friendship Bridge, which is a nonprofit organization based in Lakewood. I’m a member of the Foothills Circle. We’re a group of women who does fundraising for Friendship Bridge, and Friendship Bridge micro-lends to indigenous women in Guatemala. The funds provide the Guatemalan women an opportunity to become entrepreneurs so they can start a business weaving or making jewelry, for example, to help support their families…CICK FOR MORE

by Rachel Turner
and Marta Ixtuc

The smell of plant leaves and bark cooking over an open fire filled the room. A colorfully dressed woman sat weaving with a wooden hand loom using brilliantly colored thread – all dyed naturally with the juices from boiled barks, plants, vegetables, flowers, and even insects. More women bustled around the room cleaning cotton, making it into thread, and dyeing it.

Seeing visitors enter, Doña Herminia stood to welcome them into one of the two shops she runs.

With confidence and pride, Doña Herminia showed her visitors the elaborate, time-intensive process traditional weavers go through to create scarves, bags, and shawls. She pointed to two plants, “These plants will provide a different color if picked during a full moon,” she said. It was obvious she held generations of knowledge that made her products special.

Doña Herminia offered her visitors the opportunity to make thread from a piece of fluffy cotton. Former US Senator Mark Udall from Colorado stepped up to the challenge. He succeeded in making a bit of thread and gained even more appreciation for the difficult task.

Doña Herminia learned traditional weaving at the knees of her mother and grandmother as a young child. She quickly grew in skill and creativity, and as a young adult, joined Ixoq AJ Keem, a group of women weavers of Maya Tz’utujil ethnicity who sell their products primarily in San Juan La Laguna. Today, she leads the organization and employs seven women in her own business.

[clickToTweet tweet=”Herminia is a real leader. She has what it takes in terms of determination, enthusiasm, and charisma. -Sen Udall” quote=”‘Herminia is a real leader. She has what it takes in terms of determination, enthusiasm, and charisma,’ commented Senator Udall.”]

A Friendship Bridge client for over five years, Doña Herminia joined the Artisan Market Access Program in 2016. “It has helped me learn about business, the North American market, quality control, and so much more,” said Doña Herminia. “Beyond that, it has shown me the value of formal education – especially for my children – since I only studied through 4^th grade.”

Doña Herminia continues to mentor women who want to become better artisans. “I want to help women learn,” said Doña Herminia. “I advise them to take advantage of opportunities presented, and to invest the time to learn. [clickToTweet tweet=”Because of what I’ve learned, I now have the power to make my own decisions. -Client Doña Herminia #empoweringwomen” quote=”Because of what I’ve learned, I now have the power to make my own decisions. -Doña Herminia”]

Traveling soon? Click here to buy handmade travel products from Doña Herminia.

 

 

Surprise and nervousness filled Bacilia Chay Pos.  Over 100 colleagues began applauding her, smiling.  She looked down, shyly, but then lifted her head thinking, “It’s not a crime to receive a prize, I’m being awarded!”

This year, Whole Planet Foundation recognized Bacilia’s work with the Field Officer Award, and she was presented the award at Friendship Bridge’s staff retreat in Guatemala. “I felt happy, encouraged, and satisfied because my work is being recognized,” says Bacilia. “These types of prizes are important because they encourage.  I don’t just feel like a part of the organization, I am Friendship Bridge. That’s what motivates me each day to help with the development of women.”

Bacilia has been a facilitator (loan officer) with Friendship Bridge for 13 years. She manages over 514 clients with over $225,000 loan portfolio. Not only that, her clients have a repayment rate of over 99%.

What’s the key to her success?  Many, certainly, but one of the most important is her compassionate heart. Most days, Bacilia leaves her home early, traveling on public transportation to conduct Non-Formal Education sessions and oversee loan payments for her Trust Banks. “I most enjoy treating the women with respect, understanding them, and figuring out their needs,” says Bacilia.  “I learn from them, and they learn from me.”

As an indigenous woman, Bacilia has a deep understanding of the lives of the women she serves. Similar to many Friendship Bridge clients, Bacilia’s parents were only able to support her through a portion of her education. From the sixth grade on, Bacilia worked on coffee farms and cleaned homes to pay for her high school education.

Today, she prioritizes her clients’ education as well as her five children’s, so they can have tools to invest in their futures.

“A very powerful word used at Friendship Bridge is empowerment,” says Bacilia. “If we as employees are empowered, we can empower the clients. That’s the most rewarding part of my job, seeing entire Trust Banks of women become empowered.”

If we as employees are empowered, we can empower the clients. -Bacilia Click To Tweet