this post is third in a series from HOPE International regional representative Chris Horst
Three months ago I started a journey, in monthly installments, to two fictional cities—Assetsville and Needsville—both cities representative of poor communities in Africa. While the issues, such as education, health care and sanitation, in these cities are identical, the responses to these issues could not be more different—both in philosophy and methodology.
“Is HOPE the solution for global poverty?” It is a question I am asked often, and the question which inspired the past few months’ musings. My answer to this question is a resounding no. I do not believe HOPE is the solution to global poverty. Christ-centered microfinance is wonderfully effective, but it is not a miracle cure. What I do believe is that the principles undergirding HOPE, and the work of the fantastic organizations I highlighted over the past few weeks, are the solution.
Effective service and ministry to poor communities and individuals should affirm:
• Assets trump needs: All individuals, regardless of how great their needs, are created in the image of God and abounding in strengths, skills, and dreams. The doctor-patient approach to poverty (“you have problems – I can cure them”) will never achieve lasting change—it will simply reveal, and even create, more needs and deeper problems. Over time, this perspective will create unhealthy dependency, eroding the autonomy and creativity of communities and individuals.
• Their solutions over our ideas: Regardless of the clout of our graduate degrees, or the breadth of our professional backgrounds, the best solutions to community challenges reside within the members of the communities. We need to unlock ingenuity, not rest on our pedigrees.
• An exit strategy versus an empire strategy: Transitioning to (or starting with) local leadership should be the goal. It is financially—and even philosophically—prohibitive to employ Westerners to permanently staff organizations in communities abroad. All international (non-local) workers should be focused on working themselves out of a job.
• Dignity above desperation in our messaging: It is easy to motivate people to act with shocking images of babies with bloated stomachs and starving moms with flies in their eyes. But, easy is not always best. I believe we need to abandon guilt marketing and communicate the worth and beauty of all people and communities, even those who suffer from seemingly catastrophic material poverty.
• We are all poor: What if we viewed hunger the same way we viewed over-eating? What if we viewed the challenge of living in a shanty as the mirrored challenge of keeping up with the Joneses? What if we viewed the problem of not having enough money as a counter-problem to the addiction to money? Each person and community has issues, though some may be more hidden, more below-the-surface, than others. We need to abandon the “savior complex,” serve with humility, and recognize that we are all broken people in need of help.
• Helping is enabling: If you help a vengeful poor person – and there is no heart change – he will simply become a wealthy tyrant. Helping individuals and communities without speaking to heart issues is like baking a cake with vinegar. The size of the cake, quality of ingredients and intricacy of the decorations are irrelevant if sin is not addressed. We are only enabling the oppressed to become the oppressors if we do not boldly communicate the truth of the Gospel.
Here’s my summary encouragement: Ask the hard questions of the ministries and organizations where you are volunteering and giving financially. Examine whether you would be more likely to find their philosophy, theology and methodology in Needsville or Assetsville. Our resources—time, talents and treasure—are finite and precious. We care called to invest them wisely.
In the spirit of Valentine’s Day, read HOPE’s top five ways Christ-centered microfinance is an expression of love.
More and more people are coming to understand the financial benefits of microfinance. At HOPE, however, we believe the benefits can be more than financial. We believe the heart of microfinance is reaching out to those in need with the transforming love of Jesus Christ. If we are to model Christ, we need to embrace others with dignity and enable them to facilitate change in their own lives. In this season marked by love, we want to share five key ways Christ-centered microfinance is an expression of love.
1. Financial services are dignity-affirming opportunities.
All of us want the best for those we love, but so often poverty prevents people from fulfilling their potential and steals their dignity. In the Dominican Republic, HOPE’s partner, Esperanza International, has had the opportunity to offer small business loans, basic business training, and a support system to women who formerly worked in prostitution. One group member said her life has been changed. “Before I went out and engaged in prostitution. I feel safer now because I don’t go out. And now I can support my family by selling clothes. I knew about the love of God before, but I didn’t understand it. Now I understand that God loves me.”
2. Group members are in it together.
Members of community banks or savings groups develop a special bond. Meeting week after week, praying together, and sharing triumphs and struggles, groups grow in solidarity. One HOPE India savings group member confessed to her fellow group members that her husband beat her regularly. Instead of merely sympathizing, the other women in her group took action. They travelled to her home, and in a show of solidarity and courage, they confronted her husband. Knowing that the abuse could no longer be perpetrated in secret and that these women cared enough for his wife to hold him accountable, the man stopped beating his wife.
3. Microfinance can promote reconciliation.
In one small Rwandan village there were two feuding brothers and only one savings group. Both valued the opportunity enough to tolerate one another, but neither planned to reconcile. As the savings group began to rotate its meeting locations to various members’ homes, the first brother was forced to decide: Would he skip the meeting and forfeit this opportunity or would he enter his brother’s home? He attended the meeting. A few weeks later, his brother attended a meeting at his home. This second meeting opened with a reading from John 3:16 and a discussion of love. The brothers began to cry, pleading with one another for forgiveness. Faith, finances, and community united in such a way that two enemies became reconciled brothers.
4. Microfinance offers opportunities to share God’s love.
Again and again we hear from our loan officers that the best part of their job is sharing the love of Jesus. This was just the message one HOPE China client needed to hear. He had always been a family man, but after his wife passed away, Liu saw little meaning in his life. He became addicted to alcohol, grew distant from his daughter, and let his business slide. He wanted a change, so he sought a loan from HOPE China, but life still seemed empty. When his loan officer shared the Gospel, Liu said Jesus was exactly what he needed. His family and his community have seen the difference. Once heartbroken, Liu is now filled with joy. He sings while he works, and he says his prayers are prayers of gratitude. Seeing Liu’s genuine transformation, both his daughter and mother have come to put their faith in Christ as well.
5. Microfinance enables clients to show love to their communities.
As a mother of a special needs child, Xiomara longed to stay home with her daughter to give her the care she required - but her income was also needed to provide for her daughter. Living in a community in the Dominican Republic where many of her neighbors left their children behind and travelled to resort towns to work, Xiomara realized that she probably wasn’t the only mother facing this difficult choice. She wanted mothers and fathers to know that their children were well cared for, even while they were away at work. She opened a school and daycare center using a loan from HOPE’s partner in the Dominican Republic, Esperanza International. Parents pay Xiomara to care for their children as they are able, enabling her to provide for her own family, but Xiomara’s love for children and her community extends beyond her business interests. “I will never turn down a child because of a parent’s inability to pay,” she says.
Want to show love by supporting microfinance? Give a heart-felt Valentine’s gift of HOPE here.
Think there are other ways Christ-centered microfinance can be an expression of love? Share your thoughts!
It’s no longer good enough to kill two birds with one stone. We now require each stone to kill six birds. Case in point: While I’m not cool enough to own an iPhone, I have friends who are, and I am continually amazed at its diverse functionality. Mobile communication technology is an absolute marvel in itself, but it’s no longer enough for our phones to make and receive calls from anywhere in the world. Now we require them to provide email, directions, games, web browsing, news, stock trading, and blogging. Daily, the list expands. Are you pregnant and need to track your contractions? Now you can with the Birth Buddy app on your iPhone. You name it – “there’s an app for that.”
Microfinance isn’t just about making loans anymore. Traditional microfinance in and of itself is transformative, but the opportunities for innovation on the microfinance framework are boundless. Clean water is a serious issue around the world; globally, one in six people lack access. HOPE’s program in the Philippines pioneered an innovative, employment-based strategy to address this serious issue. In partnership with PepsiCo, they built a top-notch water purification system right in the branch office. Twenty of their clients took out loans to purchase the water in bulk. These water vendors then load up their bicycles with jugs of water and sell the water in some of the most-underserved communities in the city. Through this model, they collectively sell over 300,000 gallons of clean water annually. Sure, it’s wonderful that our clients in the Philippines can access financial services, but what about the dirty water they drink every day? Microfinance has an app for that.
In the Dominican Republic, many of our clients are able to run a business, but they sadly have family members who are suffering with or have died from AIDS or other sexually-transmitted diseases. When I visited a community bank in the Dominican Republic last year, the loan officer conducted a comprehensive, biblically-based STD training during one of the group’s bi-weekly loan repayment meetings using educational materials developed by a healthcare organization. It’s great our clients there have a safe place to save their money, but how do they educate their children about sexual health? Yep, there’s an app for that.
Recognizing that their clients completely lacked access to Bibles and Christian literature, HOPE Ukraine developed an innovative solution to address this disparity. They have thousands of clients throughout Ukraine, and when they started distributing Bibles, the Jesus Film, and Christian literature at client meetings, immediately they had created a viable distribution channel for these much-needed resources. Having access to capital is important, but what directs our clients’ financial decision-making and priorities? Do they have access to God’s word? You guessed it. There’s an app for that.
Rob Hartley, HOPE’s Savings and Credit Association Specialist, writes from Rwanda where he has been overseeing HOPE’s work in initiating savings and credit associations. Some groups’ members contribute just pennies a week, but together they are learning to manage their money and effectively save what little excess they may have.
Brotherly love, like the city of Philadelphia, can sometimes be an enigma. Brothers fight. Philadelphians can be rude.
Living in the same Rwandan village there were two brothers, neighbors, who would not talk to each other. Their families would not talk to each other, and their children were not allowed to play with each other. I don’t know how the feud started, and there’s a good chance that they don’t know either, but these things have a tendency to die hard.
Somehow the two brothers ended up in the same savings group. Probably because there was just one savings group, and both valued membership enough to somehow tolerate the other. This savings group, like many others, rotates locations in each member’s home. How did the brothers not see this coming?
The first time the rotation lands on one of the brothers, the other brother had to choose.
Surprised, at the end of the meeting the other brother returned home safely and nothing had happened. He shared his brother’s home for the first time, and both faced another day.
The next tense meeting, the brothers switched roles. Now the first brother entered his brother’s house and again nothing bad happened.
Actually, on this second occasion, something did happen. At the beginning of these meetings someone usually prays. At this meeting, someone read John 3:16 and began to discuss love. That was enough for the brothers to begin crying and ask forgiveness.
Reconciled brothers. I think something meaningful happens when you put faith, community, and what you do with your money in the same gathering. These are important matters.
HOPE’s first CEO and the author of A Billion Bootstraps, Eric Thurman, has written a piece highlighting the African economic crisis and the difference that access to microfinance could make for the 380 million Africans mired in poverty. Mr. Thurman speaks of the establishment of HOPE Congo and the promise this ministry brings to those who access its services.
The stock market meltdown that began in the United States, and then spread to Europe and other wealthy countries, is teaching us a lot about financial disaster. It proved that extreme economic troubles call for swift and strong responses. As banks and other investment firms failed, both governments and the private sector swooped in with massive recovery programs. The crisis was taken seriously because so many people in so many countries faced personal financial catastrophe.
If this financial crisis merits a powerful response, even more, Africa deserves strong medicine for its economic ills. This is reinforced by new data from the World Bank released shortly before the stock market crash. The researchers called their new statistics a, “major overhaul to the World Bank’s past estimates of global poverty, incorporating new and better data.” The numbers reveal economic disaster that, like sub-prime lending in the West, will result in great peril for millions of people if ignored. One particularly important finding shows how much worse poverty is in Africa compared with the rest of the world. The revised data (available at http://www.bicusa.org/en/Article.3887.aspx) shows progress in all regions of the world, except Africa. In Asia, the percentage of people living on $1.25 (USD) per day or less dropped significantly during the period. Africa was the only area, worldwide, where the percentage of poor people did not decline. For 25 years that percentage has been stuck with 50 percent of the continent’s population trapped in severe poverty. Not only did the percentage for Africa fail to improve, even worse, the number of people unable to achieve a decent standard of living soared.
The total of Africans locked in poverty nearly doubled – from 200 million to 380 million – between 1981 and 2005, the cutoff date of the revised information. Further, the depth of that poverty was worse than previously realized. The average person in this group struggled to survive on just 70 cents per day. This prompted the new Chief Economist for the World Bank, Justin Lin, to conclude, “…we must redouble our efforts, especially in sub-Saharan Africa.” For those of us who care about Africans and believe in their innate resourcefulness, this situation is unacceptable.
There is a solution, perhaps not for the total economic development of all 48 sub-Saharan nations, but it is a remedy that will drastically reduce the number of Africans mired in deep poverty. The cure is microfinance. Though the cure is proven, it is woefully underutilized. Financial services, whether micro or otherwise, remain unavailable for most Africans. New programs must be launched, existing ones expanded, and regulations favorable to microfinance adopted.
The lack of even rudimentary financial services is a big factor that keeps so many Africans impoverished. Most rely on self-employment, be it farming, vending, or some other small-business activity. They have no place to turn when they need even a small amount of working capital, as little as $100, to grow their tiny enterprises and increase their incomes. In their entire lifetimes, most have never interacted with a financial institution. About five years ago, I helped establish the first legally registered microcredit NGO in the Democratic Republic of Congo [HOPE International]. At that time, only one in one thousand DRC citizens had a bank account. While Congo has faced a dreadful array of difficulties including conflict, AIDS, and natural disaster, the near total lack of financial services kept people from progressing even when they could. In the United States, if only one in one thousand people had access to banking services, half of the U.S. population would be desperately poor, too! Whether in the most developed or least developed countries, people must have reliable ways to borrow, save, and invest money. Unfortunately, those services are often missing in Africa. One study found that 65 percent of Africans had no financial services available. An upsurge in microfinance is urgently needed so Africans can work their way out of relentless poverty.
The whole world is struggling with economic troubles but, arguably, Africa is in the worst predicament. What this immense continent needs, directly parallels the emergency financial measures recently adopted for the world’s largest economies. Africa needs reliable financial services, widely available for the common people. Unless that occurs, Africa will continue being the sole region of the world where poverty keeps getting worse when the World Bank updates its statistics the next time.
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Eric Thurman supervised microfinance programs in 30 countries while CEO of Opportunity International and, later, HOPE International. He was CEO of Geneva Global when it researched and funded human development programs of many types in more than 100 countries. Today, Eric Thurman is a consultant to NGOs, donors, and churches that support programs in poverty communities globally. He co-authored A Billion Bootstraps with Phil Smith, a successful businessman and client. The book is a popular introduction to the microfinance movement.
