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RESULTS - The Power to End Poverty
RESULTS and RESULTS Educational Fund (REF) are sister organizations that, together, are a leading force in ending poverty in the United States and around the world. We create long-term solutions to poverty by supporting programs that address its root causes — lack of access to medical care, education, or opportunity to move up the economic ladder. We do this by empowering ordinary people to become extraordinary voices for the end of poverty in their communities, the media, and the halls of government. The collective voices of these passionate grassroots activists coordinated with grass-tops efforts driven by our staff leverage millions of dollars for programs and improved policies that give low-income people the tools they need to move out of poverty.
RESULTS: Global - Orange County
Blog for the RESULTS website http://www.results.org/website/article.asp?id=19
PeopleWeaver.com - Kyangwali Women's MicroCredit Business Loans
Kyangwali Women's Economic Assistance
We provide economic assistance to the women living at the Kyangwali Refugee Settlement in Uganda. The intent of this assistance is to help the community escape extreme poverty. Current assistance projects include:
MicroCredit for Individuals
Community Grain Mill Purchase
Basket Making for Export
Microfinance’s Success Sets Off a Debate in Mexico - New York Times
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But Compartamos’s decision to go public last April became a flashpoint in what had been a genteel debate over how microfinance could tap into the financial markets’ vast resources. The initial public offering gets special mention at every microfinance conference, and has been condemned by Mr. Yunus, the Nobel laureate.
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They are the center of a fractious debate: how far should microfinance go toward becoming big business?
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Marginal Revolution: My micro-credit essay with Karol Boudreaux
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For better or worse, microborrowing often entails a kind of bait and switch. The borrower claims that the money is for a business, but uses it for other purposes. In effect, the cash allows a poor entrepreneur to maintain her business without having to sacrifice the life or education of her child. In that sense, the money is for the business, but most of all it is for the child. Such lifesaving uses for the funds are obviously desirable, but it is also a sad reality that many microcredit loans help borrowers to survive or tread water more than they help them get ahead. This sounds unglamorous and even disappointing, but the alternative—such as no doctor’s visit for a child or no school for a year—is much worse.
The Chronicle, 7/20/2006: The Big Promise of Small Loans
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Microfinance, pioneered in the early 1970s by nonprofit groups like Grameen Bank, in Bangladesh, and Acción International, in Latin America, is one of the hottest ideas in philanthropy — and it may become the next big thing in the investment world, too.
Windfalls of War - The Center for Public Integrity
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Louis Berger was one of the six companies chosen by USAID to bid on the main Iraqi reconstruction contract, but lost out to Bechtel. The four other companies that bid were Fluor, Halliburton's Kellogg, Brown & Root, Parsons, and Washington Group International.
The Failed Promises of International Aid | Corrente
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“The report estimated that 40% of the aid money spent in Afghanistan has found its way back to rich donor countries such as the US through corporate profits, consultants’ salaries and other costs, significantly inflating the cost of projects. For example, a road between the centre of Kabul and the international airport cost over $2.3m per kilometre in US aid money, at least four times the average cost of building a road in Afghanistan, today’s report says.”
And the companies the contracts went to bear familiar names: KBR, the Louis Berger group, Chemonics International, Bearing Point, and Dyncorp International.
What Microloans Miss: Financial Page: The New Yorker
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The U.N. declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit, and the microfinance pioneer Muhammad Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006, while celebrities like Natalie Portman and companies like Benetton have become fervent microloan advocates. Even ordinary Americans can now get in on the act, at sites like Kiva.org, where you can make a microloan yourself. (Right now, a clothing vender in Cambodia needs seven hundred dollars to “purchase more clothes to sell.”)
The Micromagic of Microcredit
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Karol Boudreaux
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After decades of failure, the world’s aid
organizations seem to think they have at last found a winning idea. The
United Nations declared 2005 the “International Year of
Microcredit.” Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared that providing
microloans to help poor people launch small businesses recognizes that they
“are the solution, not the problem. It is a way to build on their
ideas, energy, and vision. It is a way to grow productive enterprises, and
so allow communities to prosper.” - 2 more annotations...
The Entrepreneurial Mind: Cynicism about Free Enterprise
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t takes time to build wealth. And real wealth comes from free enterprise. Are microloans the answer to transform an economy? Of course not. But they are a critical step in building long term transformations. Microloan programs are not just jobs programs, or worse yet, mechanisms for the redistribution of wealth from one country to another. Instead, they are creating a cultural seedbed for economic freedom and independence.
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The "richness" of a country is not just measured in GDP. Microloans are making societies richer by creating hope, independence, and pride among thousands of "micro" entrepreneurs. And over the long run this will surely create monetary wealth in the countries that benefit from these efforts.
U.S. 'micro-loan' effort yields big results in Iraqi province - Los Angeles Times
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Al'laur Abd Mottar, 50, had a dream of starting a business to support his wife and eight children. He would buy and sell scrap iron, a material much in demand as residents seek to rebuild homes and businesses damaged by fighting between U.S. Marines and insurgents.
But he had no money. The one bank in town that lends money had been disrupted by the prolonged fight. Even if the bank was up and running, a loan to a penniless dreamer without collateral would not have been a priority.
In November, Mottar got a $3,000 loan from a program underwritten by the U.S. Agency for International Development that is bringing the "micro-loan" concept to war-ravaged Anbar west of Baghdad. -
To oversee the micro-loan program, USAID turned to the Louis Berger Group, an international consulting firm based in Morristown, N.J. Supervision of the micro-loans is only a small part of a $154-million contract between USAID and the firm to promote economic growth in all 18 provinces.
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