Microfinance is ready to take flight!

Less than a week left until we take flight for India!!! The Microfinance team is excited and ready to meet our assigned self-help groups and to learn first-hand about their triumphs and struggles as a group. While at C.O.R.D. we want to put together an inspirational video complied of interviews with “A” rated self-help groups that we can leave behind at C.O.R.D. We hope this video will help other self-help groups find inspiration and motivation to become an “A” rated group like some of their peers. We have also put together a few surveys that we hope to leave at C.O.R.D. These surveys will allow C.O.R.D. to get a better understanding of the various types of income generating activities that their community is looking for as well as areas of improvements for current training programs in place at C.O.R.D. There is a lack of participation in the trainings that are offered and we believe by pooling together some feedback from the community, C.O.R.D. might be able to better identify the lack of enthusiasm and help increase training demand amongst their community.

I mentioned in my last post, “Microfinance at C.O.R.D.”, that we were scheduled to have a phone call with three group leaders to get a better understanding of what motivates their members and what has led to some of their successes. Bhairavi is fluent in Hindi and was able to have a wonderful phone conversation with the group leaders and then relayed the phone conversation back to Troy, Steven and I. The groups we spoke with were all formed in the year 2000 and had very different paths to success. One group leader heavily enforced the importance about being on time and consistent attendance at their group meetings and the group members really thrived off of her strict enforcement. One key success driver for her group members was renting rooms out in their homes to local college students. Another group leader reduced her group's lending rates so that the women would feel more comfortable borrowing and being able to pay back their loans. As the women’s confidence grew, the leader slowly increased their lending rates to the standard at C.O.R.D. of 2% a month. We were very grateful to hear these women share their stories and cannot wait to hear many more when we arrive.

I will be blogging from India so make sure to check back to hear about our in-country experiences!