Economic Growth Colombia Project #24628

Empower Entrepreneurs Throughout Colombia

by Opportunity International

Project Report | Jan 16, 2019
January 2019 Update

By Katie Morgan | Online Marketing Specialist

Meet Theresa! For years, Teresa and her husband have earned a living collecting and sorting garbage to support their five kids. When Teresa was offered the chance to learn to build her own recycling cart, she used an Opportunity loan to build it and to purchase materials in bulk, increasing her productivity and her income. Now, she saves every day to achieve her dream of opening a restaurant. According to Teresa, "My life dream is to open a restaurant where my whole family can work together. I am thankful for the opportunities I have received. I am just getting started."

Moving families out of poverty once and for all. Opportunity's partner in Colombia, AGAPE, is tackling the challenges that threaten to trap families in poverty. They do this by providing a robust package of financial and non-financial services to create transformational opportunities that empower entrepreneurial women and men as they work their way out of poverty. With support and training, clients grow their businesses, gain financial security, and improve their living conditions. AGAPE is a vehicle for change in the realms of leadership, home improvement, education, and community projects.

Training and mentoring for lasting change. To ensure clients receive effective, transformative growth opportunities, AGAPE develops curriculum and programs designed to address their specific, expressed needs. AGAPE offers workshops such as savings awareness training for Trust Group clients and leadership training for Trust Group leaders. AGAPE also provides training in essential client protection principles, such as how to protect personal banking information and how to use available resources to resolve issues with loan repayments or account balances.

So far this year, AGAPE has trained 658 loan clients. Currently, significant budget constraints pose difficulties in effectively reaching areas where training is needed, however, AGAPE holds fast to the goal of expanding trainings in Cartagena and Bogota, key areas in need of client support.

AGAPE loan officers desire to respond to God's commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. By caring for Opportunity clients through their work, loan officers act as a physical embodiment of Christ's love.

Providing clients with excellent service and relevant, high-impact products. Opportunity Colombia implements Social Performance Management to ensure excellent client service and protection by aligning products, processes, operations, and systems to the organization's mission and to clients' expressed needs. Currently, the bank is undertaking a review of their data collection system to identify options to increase accuracy and analysis of the client information collected.

Constructing or improving homes to keep families healthier and safer. Opportunity Colombia continues to expand its home improvement loan program, House of My Dreams, which serves families in Bogota, Cartagena, Sincelejo, Barranquilla, Magangue, and Santa Marta. As of June 30, 2018, Opportunity Colombia has disbursed 1,048 home improvement loans since the start of the program.

AGAPE delivers training resources and a robust support plan that complement the bank's home improvement loans, ensuring Colombia's poorest populations can make improvements, including renovations to foundations, walls, doors, windows, kitchens, bathrooms, roofs, and floors. AGAPE trains loan officers, assesses client ability to take on additional credit and then provides technical assistance throughout the construction process. AGAPE also provides a 10-booklet series covering home improvement projects, equipping clients to become more knowledgeable about financing and planning home improvements.

Links:

Permalink

Oct 18, 2018
Creating Economic Opportunities in Colombia

By Katie Morgan | Online Marketing Specialist

Opportunity International has expanded economic opportunities for disadvantaged female entrepreneurs living in rural, violence-affected communities in Colombia. Through your support, we expanded financial inclusion for women, helped more children from impoverished families go to school, and expanded client trainings and financial services to increase their incomes and create more jobs. We achieved this through:

Expanding outreach to women entrepreneurs living in violence-affected areas. While still engaging impoverished working families in Colombia, we have reached further down the economic ladder to engage women living in impoverished, violence-affected communities, introducing them to the most basic concepts of financial literacy and income-generating businesses.
Empowering women entrepreneurs as job creators in marginalized communities. You have provided moms with the tools and skills they need to reach their potential to support their families and become leaders and job creators within their communities.
Expanding access to education for girls. Together, we built the capacity of entrepreneurs who have launched or expanded quality schools that can change the future for children, especially girls, along with their families and entire communities.

Expanding access to economic and educational opportunities has proven vitally important for low-income Colombian women entrepreneurs and their children. The positive impact of this project has rippled beyond entrepreneurs and school proprietors to build stronger communities across the country. Through your generosity, Opportunity has provided critical support, training, and economic opportunities to hardworking Colombian entrepreneurs and school proprietors.

During the first six months of 2018:

We opened two new branches in rural, violence-affected Colombian communities and began serving women with the financial resources and support they need to succeed.
Opportunity Colombia number of entrepreneurs with loans grew by 19% from 6,180 to 7,348. The increased outreach is attributed in part to the two new branches.
We trained 658 entrepreneur clients. Including family members, 3,290 people have been positively impacted as clients grow thriving businesses that increase household income and create jobs for neighbors.
We updated our 7-module training series for both savings groups and Trust Groups based on their expressed needs from data collected through our Social Performance Management tool and client surveys.
416 Colombian schools are investing Opportunity School Improvement loans, enhancing education quality for about 104,000 children through improved infrastructure like better classrooms and gender-separated bathrooms.
Colombian parents are using 428 Opportunity School Fee loans to cover the education costs of about 1,300 kids.
Ten youth were accessing College/Vocational loans to pay for continuing education.
Opportunity Colombia dramatically increased their outreach by developing and launching an education product that funds community moms who start preschools in their homes. The pre-schools are growing and creating jobs for other moms in the neighborhood.

Links:

Permalink

Jul 19, 2018
Opportunity Clients in Colombia

By Katie Morgan | Online Marketing Specialist

At Opportunity International’s Fifth Annual Congress of Leaders, our staff celebrated the continuation of Opportunity’s work and the lives of our clients in Colombia. Clients like, Basilia and Omaira. Basilia, who now leads a life of dignity, having worked hard to utilize her loans to transform her house into a safe, comfortable home for her family. Omaira represents what it looks like to live with empathy. After receiving loans that created opportunities to better her own life, she changed someone else’s by giving a plot of her land to another family. As our programs grow, so will our ability to provide the opportunities necessary for people like Basilia and Omaira to better their own lives and the lives of others.

Opportunity continues to reach an increasing number of clients in Colombia. From 2014 to 2017, Opportunity has increased the number of savings accounts from 24,816 to 49,604 accounts. Despite economic challenges in 2017 which made growth in loan services difficult, Opportunity reached an additional 1,000 small business clients in the first few months of 2018, increasing our number of loan clients from 6,180 to 7,282.

Opportunity’s partner NGO, AGAPE, also expanded its reach in 2017. Over the course of the year, AGAPE conducted 2,438 training sessions, including training of 498 Trust Group leaders. In order to fight the difficulty of household instability, AGAPE also provided 188 families with technical assistance for the Roof & Floor home improvement program.

Opportunity Colombia continues to progress its Educational Finance program. The model of EduFinance provides loans for both the providers and recipients of education. First, Opportunity offers School Fee Loans to allow families with inconsistent income to pay the payments required at the start of the school year. In 2017, the EduFinance program in Colombia provided families with 491 School Fee Loans to support the educational costs of approximately 1,525 children. Opportunity also works to create better schooling opportunities for children through its School Improvement Loans. These loans used by educators and providers who are running private schools with quality education options for children. Educators used 414 School Improvement Loans in 2017, amounting to $754,540 in loans to enhance education quality through improved infrastructure such as better classrooms and gender-separated bathrooms.

Finally, Opportunity’s partner, AGAPE worked hard in 2017 to create awareness and move clients toward clean water resources. 289 individuals from 11 Trust Groups participated in training aimed at creating awareness of the danger in consuming unsafe water. As a result of the pilot program, 52 clients indicated their interest in obtaining a BioSand water filter in the future.

Thanks to your donations, clients like Basilia and Omaira have access to the tools and training they need to support their families in Colombia.

Links:

Permalink

‹ 1 2 3 4 5 ›

About Project Reports

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.