Microfinance

We seek to help the poorer people in urban areas experience economic, physical, social, and spiritual transformation. One of the ways this transformation can be achieved is through microfinance programs. This approach enables the poor to develop and to maintain their own productive economic activities while receiving training, teaching, and support from Christians.

In the fight against global poverty, microfinance is a unique weapon in the form of loans given to already created or newly-forming tiny businesses run by the poor themselves. In developing countries, microfinance

• employs up to 70% of the labor force.
• creates work for women, minority groups, and the uneducated, untrained, unskilled.
• provides needed products and services.

Microfinance is a very simple concept. For example, in our Hope Partnership program, a community group of 20 to 30 people is offered 27 hours of training. In addition to financial topics, the training includes several hours of teaching on evangelism, prayer, and ethics. After these sessions, each participant has a business plan and an understanding of loan repayment, bookkeeping, and marketing. Each participant invests some of his or her own money and begins a small business with the help of a seed grant of $8 up to $400.

Loans continue to be offered as a business expands. Specific spiritual topics are integrated into the training, and as the new entrepreneurs meet to pay back and receive loans, prayer and Bible study are presented to address both the physical and spiritual sides of transformation. Men and women become empowered to control their own economic state and future, and this empowerment leads to an improved standard of living and subsequent behavior changes.

People come to Christ and are discipled through the training and accountability groups. As people work and earn a living, they begin to tithe in the churches so that the churches become self-supporting and a conduit of the microfinance program.

Microfinance is an important ingredient in many of our Community Health Evangelism programs, as well as in our marketplace ministries in closed countries. Perhaps you would like to participate in our microfinance program through a contribution. Your gift could change an entire family’s economical and emotional situation.  To give to the microfinance program click here.
explore microfinance