Philanthropy

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Planting seeds to outgrow poverty

Opportunity International finds microloans blossom into economic independence

By: Kevin Rollason

28/11/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0

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Erna and Herb Buller, with Marian Deegan (right), hold a painting and a pair of shoes, both made by recipients of microloans.

You give a donation to most charities, they use it right away on their work.

Give a donation to Opportunity International Canada (OIC) and your money will keep coming back like a boomerang to help people create and expand businesses in developing countries over and over.

That's because, unlike most help organizations, OIC gives out your money as a microloan.

Then, while the recipient is working on their business, they begin paying back the loan along with interest. The money is then loaned out to someone else.

That's something that appeals to Winnipeggers Herb and Erna Buller.

The Bullers have been supporting the organization for about five years, since learning about it from a friend's relative.

"My wife and I were familiar with microfinance," Herb said.

"We really like the organization because they meet with the people who get the loans on a weekly basis. We also like that most of the people helped are women with young children.

"And the money we've given keeps being used again and again."

Opportunity International (OI), a Christian microenterprise development organization, began in 1971 when Al Whittaker, the president of Bristol-Myers International, began the first Opportunity program in Latin America when people told him "We need work. With jobs we will solve our own problems."

The organization merged in 1979, with a similar one founded in Australia in 1976.

The organization realizes many people in developing countries have business ideas, but can't realize them because they are denied bank loans due to poverty or lack of collateral.

The organization reached our country a decade ago. Today, OI has more than 1.12 million loans working in communities around the world with more than $700 million given out in loans in 2007 alone. It is responsible for creating or sustaining 1.4 million jobs.

About 84 per cent of the loans go to women.

The Canadian arm of OI gave out $2.3 million in microloans and partner training last year.

The average loan is $162, but that can be covered with a donation of $100 to the organization because it can leverage the money to make it $186. Loans ranged from $25 to $500.

OI helps clients in 28 countries around the world, including Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, China, Romania, Russia, Colombia and Nicaragua.

It's not often -- if ever -- this page can quote rock musician Bono of U2, but here's what he said about microloans:

"Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime. It's missing something. Microfinance is the fishing rod, the boat and the net."

The Bullers have actually seen the equivalents of that fishing rod, boat and net.

They travelled with OIC to Peru a few years ago and saw people who received loans and what they did with them.

"We saw an artist painting pictures and selling them. Of course, we bought one and brought it home," Herb said.

"We also went and saw people doing the manufacturing of textiles. They were now able to buy enough inventory to fill the orders they had."

Because the money the Bullers donated also helped a shoemaker in that area, a new pair of blue children's shoes was given to them in thanks. Without the help of microloans, both the painting and the shoes might not exist. They might just continue to be a dream.

David Stiller, OIC's founding chairman, said most of the businesses that loans are given to are ones that service their local communities.

"We really focus on the poorest of the entrepreneurial poor," Stiller said.

"We want to bring them up so they can graduate into the formal banking system."

Marian Deegan, OIC's director of philanthropy in Manitoba, says microfinancing is a way of offering help by valuing skills and ability.

"They get small loans to allow them to find their own way out of poverty," Deegan said.

"Oftentimes, the question I get is 'Marian, we have so much poverty here, why not look after things in this province first?' There is merit there, but we also have to understand it is one world and one people.

"We have to solve poverty around the world."

OI has an astonishing payback rate. Less than two per cent of its loans are in arrears more than 30 days.

The organization now offers both banking for the people it helps as well as microinsurance, which helps the working poor work through unexpected obstacles like flooding, drought, hurricanes or a death in the family or hospitalization.

The Canadian division just came out with a fundraising book entitled Faces of Opportunity. The book, on sale at McNally Robinson Booksellers, chronicles the stories of 20 women and men who received microloans, including a woman in Indonesia who bought 1,000 coconuts and sold the distilled oil and a woman in Uganda who used the loan to buy a sewing machine and now employs 57 people in all her enterprises.

For every 10 books sold at $20 apiece, a new microloan is issued.

Just in time for Christmas, its OppStock program lets people get a symbolic stock certificate for $100, which they can personalize with a gift recipient's name, representing the start-up loan for one business in Africa or Latin America. Afterwards, you can check the OIC website to watch your investment grow.

As Stiller says: "It is the gift that just keeps giving.

"It's an incredible investment -- it's not a disbursement."

For more information, go to www.opportunityinternational.ca or call 895-8717.

kevin.rollason@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 28, 2009 B8

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