Micro-credits for Baru Island young entrepreneurs

Paige is GlobalGiving's Champion for Customer Bliss in our office in Washington, DC. During a trip to Colombia, she had the chance to visit some of GlobalGiving's projects. Here is her postcard from the field.

What one thinks of when hearing “Baru” and visiting Cartagena is generally turquoise waters and powdery, white sand beaches. However, there is another side to this tropical paradise, and it isn’t as simple as a coco loco on Playa Blanca.

I was picked up by the Hernan Echavarria Foundation’s fearless leader Ana in Cartagena, and we started making our way south of the city to Isla Baru. Recently made more accessible thanks to a bridge and paved road, the island is beautiful and rugged, but due to it’s previously remote nature, quite rural. This is where the foundation comes in! On top of the microloan program that is the focus of their GlobalGiving project, the Hernan Echavarria Foundation has a deep and broad portfolio of projects on Isla Baru including the creation of a entrepreneur’s school, an elderly community center, a road refurbishing advocacy program, traveling health care workers to offer free consultations, and much more. However this trip was focused on the impressive work that’s being done with their youth micro-loan program.

Bouncing down some dirt roads we came to Hernan Echavarria Fondation’s offices in the heart of the town of Santa Ana on Isla Baru. Their offices are clean, open, and welcoming for the community members wandering down the main road past it. Ana and I chatted in their recreational/multi-purpose room where trainings and workshops for the local mirco-loan recipients are held and munched on dangerously delicious cheese empanadas. After brainstorming about how GlobalGiving can further help their work we went out to visit some of the loan grantees!

First was a stop with Ana, a bright, smiling young woman who has a convenience stop in the town out of her home. “We chose her because she’s smart and organized! Everything is always perfectly in order.” Ana is training to be a receptionist in Cartagena, so on top of selling standard wares in her shop, she also takes orders for those unable to make the (costly) trek to Cartagena. When asked if she’d be closing the shop after completing her studies as a receoptionist she giggled and said no. She loved having her shop and she wanted to continue to expand and grow.

The second grantee I met was a woman who was on her second round of a loan working as a tailor in the town. Her home was crowded with kids and family and was also clean and well kept. We saw her workshop in the back of the building which housed her two sewing tables, a work table, and a series of screen printing patterns. Gina radiated confidence and assurance. She was indeed the queen of her castle. When I asked what the most important lesson was she had learned through the loan program, she said without hesitation, “Independence. I was able to move into my own home, have my own business, and now I’m teaching my daughter the importance of independence.”

And there lay the unexpected, but equally important windfall bonus to the microloan program on Isla Baru. Not only were young entrepreneurs (both men and women) creating new lives as business owners, but young women were becoming empowered.