£25 a month will empower 24 girls through our Girls Clubs to be powerful changes agents for the future.
£50 a month will help launch our innovative new WASH programme in Ghana giving women and girls dignity and access to safe drinking water.
£75 a month will empower hundreds of women in Rwanda every month with the knowledge and skills to use financial services to break free from poverty.
Spread the word to your friends, families and colleagues. With more supporters we can truly impact the lives of thousands of women and girls living in poverty.
£10,000 will support 100 farmers in Rwanda transforming the lives of 600 family members and creating or sustaining 150 jobs.
£25,000 will provide improvement loans to 6 schools providing education to 1,100 girls and creating employment opportunities across 6 communities.
£50,000 will help us recruit experts to launch our exciting new WASH programme in Ghana.
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Opportunity International UK will use your gifts where they can have the greatest impact within our global programmes. You can learn more about how Opportunity International works with women and girls here.
The Women’s and Girls Appeal is a fundraising campaign of Opportunity International UK, registered as a charity (1107713).
© 2015 Opportunity International
Contact Jo Neville at [email protected] to discuss how your company can help us impact hundreds more women and girls.
With limited materials and resources, the business was struggling and it was hard for Solange to support her family. An Opportunity loan and training changed all this.
Solange bought new and different types of sewing machines enabling her to diversify her designs and be more efficient. As a result, her business is now thriving and supporting not only her family, but her wider community.
People living in poverty don't need a handout, they need a hand up; the means to provide for themselves on a sustainable basis.
Without formal identification or any form of collateral, many banks won't serve micro-entrepreneurs, leaving them trapped in low-income generating activities.
We believe in the entrepreneurial spirit of women living in poverty to transform the future for their families and their communities. They have the ability, intelligence and desire to improve the safety and welfare of their families, they just need the opportunity. That's why Opportunity provides access to credit, savings and basic business training — the tools women need to create or sustain jobs and break free from poverty. We do this through our core model of Trust Groups.
A Trust group is a collective of 6 to 12 women micro-entrepreneurs who come together to receive small business loans, training and mentoring to invest in improving their business and increasing their profits. Each woman acts as a guarantor for other group members so if one woman is unable to repay all or part of her loan, the others take responsibility for making repayments. Regular meetings increase commitment and strengthen solidarity and over time members become a supportive group, finding solutions to their challenges together. During group meetings, Opportunity staff provides financial literacy training, which covers essential business and life skills such as budgeting, borrowing, earning and saving. Trust Group Members also elect a Chairperson, Treasurer and Secretary from within the group, which not only ensure things run well but also enables women to develop leadership skills.
An average loan for a Trust Group member is just £120, such a small amount to turn around the life of a woman and her family. As each loan is repaid, usually over a six month period, another woman gets the chance to improve her life. With a 98% repayment rate, these funds go on giving for years, and years and years. An investment in these women truly is an investment for life.
Alongside loans and financial literacy training, Opportunity also provides access to secure savings accounts, rather than a risky hiding place like under a mattress or in a hole in the ground. Finally, Opportunity encourages women micro-entrepreneurs to take out relevant and affordable insurance to shield themselves and their families from disaster in vulnerable and precarious environments.
Eugenie Nyirabagenzi is a rice farmer in Rwanda. She is 37 years old and has 5 children. She had always dreamed of enrolling them in a good school within easy reach of their home and longed to be able to feed them more nutritious meals. But the limited income from her rice farm left her trapped in a cycle of hand-to-mouth living.
When Eugenie became an Opportunity client, life began to change. With a loan of just £50 she invested in her farm. She hired her neighbours and increased her yield and now has plans to purchase more land. With the savings she deposited securely with Opportunity and crop insurance she had more security and a freedom she had never felt before.
Africa has enormous potential, not only to feed itself and eliminate huger and food insecurity, but also to be a major player in global food markets.
By 2050, Africa's population is set to climb from 820 million to 2 billion, meaning farmers will need to produce more than twice as much food to feed this rapidly growing population. The only way to address such a daunting prospect is to recognise the enormous potential of women farmers and ensure equal access to productive resources and services.
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), if women in developing countries had the same access to productive resources as men, they would increase yields on their farms and life 100-150 million people out of hunger.
We believe in the potential of female farmers to transform communities and improve food security. We work specifically with female smallholder farmers, giving them access to resources such as improved seeds and fertiliser and providing loans to cover the cost of seasonal labour. We combine this with Good Agricultural Practice training which enables smallholder farmers to improve their farms and increase their yields, thus increasing their household incomes, improving food security and creating employment opportunities for others.
We believe in the impact of a female farmer. With a loan she can invest in her farm and increase her yield. With more yield, she increases her income and thus in turn can feed her family more nutritious meals, send her children to school and save for lean times. WIth a more productive farm and increased income she can afford to employ her neighbours, increasing productivity further and providing more families with an income. With a diversified and increased crop yield, she can produce a surplus that only increases her income - but contributes to food security in her surrounding community.
On average, every female farmer will transform the lives of 6 to 7 family and community members with just one loan. That means 100 female farmers have the power to transform the lives of nearly 700 people!
With 70% of Africa working in the agricultural sector, the opportunity to impact an entire continent is within our grasp. As Bill Gates said in 2012, "The world faces a clear choice. If we invest relatively modest amounts, many poor farmers will be able to feed their families. If we don't, one in seven will continue living needlessly on the edge of starvation."
They were determined to ensure their daughters got a good education and also noticed the number of children, especially girls, in their community that were removed from school when their families couldn't afford the expense.
So, they opened a school in a small wooden structure on a rented piece of land with just 100 children. With a loan and training from Opportunity, their school has grown to serve over 900 students.
Evans says that the support from Opportunity has enabled him to realise his dreams for a better education not only for his girls, but for hundreds of other girls and children in their community.
Sub-Saharan Africa counts for 47% of out-of-school children worldwide; 54% are girls.
Girls' education is proven to be one of the most cost-effective strategies to promote development and economic growth. Studies show that educated mothers tend to have healthier, better nourished babies, and that their own children are more likely to attend school; thus breaking the vicious cycle of poverty.
Job creation is an important driving force against poverty. Providing financial solutions for the working poor addresses current poverty levels, but we can only hope to create truly impactful change for the future by also addressing the education needs of the next generation of workers.
Across Africa, parents are keen to give their children the opportunities that education affords, but state schools are bursting at the seams and often located far from home. As a result, "edu-preneurs" are establishing low-cost community schools to meet this demand. We believe in the power of the community school as a driver for improving access to and and quality of education as well as a powerful catalyst for job creation and economic growth.
With an Opportunity School Improvement Loan, these schools can build classrooms and hire teachers, which increases capacity. They can also build toilet blocks, which increases the attendance rate of girls. Opportunity also provides School Fee Loans for families reliant on small business or agriculture for their income, ensuring a child's education is not disrupted by irregular cash flow. In these communities, girls still tend to be the first to drop out of school when times are hard, so we combine these loan product with training through our Girls Clubs, teaching the importance of education, skills in income production and health training in topics such as menstrual hygiene and HIV/AIDs awareness.
As School Improvement Loans bolster infrastructure, more children attend school. As a school's attendance increases and parents' abilities to pay school fees grow, a school's income increases, creating jobs for teachers, cooks, security guards, administrators, construction and maintenance workers. Meanwhile, as the school succeeds and grows, small businesses emerge in the community, offering uniforms, transportation, food, books and school supplies. In short — alone with the financial products and services that helped it grow — becomes the engine for economic, social and education growth within a community.
Saleha comes from a remote village in India.
She received a loan to start a small construction business with her husband. But Saleha's children were still often sick from preventable illnesses like diarrhoea, meaning she couldn't work as much as she'd like to, and her income often spent on expensive medicines.
So, Saleha trained to become a health leader in her community, teaching her village about illness prevention, health treatment and nutrition. Her children are healthy and strong, and she's even helped 15 families invest in a toilet so they can reduce preventable diseases, too.
In many countries women are responsible for finding and fetching water for their families. They walk miles, wait for hours, carry very heavy loads and pay exorbitant prices. After all this effort, often the water is contaminated and even deadly. Once they're old enough, young girls will join this back-breaking work. It is estimated that women and children spend 140 million hours each day collecting water.
On average, every £1 invested in water and sanitation provides a £4 economic return.
In many countries, women and girls must wait till nightfall to relieve themselves of putting their health and personal safety at risk. Roughly 50% of all girls worldwide attend schools without toilets, resulting in many girls dropping out of school when they reach puberty due to lack of privacy. Women and girls are trapped in a cycle of poverty — they cannot work, they cannot attend school, they cannot improve their chances of earning an income.
In order to really see sustainable and impactful change for people living in poverty, we must also address the acute water, sanitation and health (WASH) needs of impoverished communities. Water and sanitation are fundamental to human development and well-being. They are critical to the achievement of development objectives such as nutrition, gender equality, education and the eradication of poverty.
We believe in the powerful economic and social impact that access to clean water and sanitation makes to women and girls. That is why we are launching a new programme that will provide micro-loans for sustainable water and sanitation services.
With access to capital and training, families will be able to install toilets and gain access to safe, clean drinking water. These loans are not traditionally income-generating but income-enhancing; they are vital if we are to eradicate poverty as they ensure people are healthier and more able to increase their income-generating potential.
As with all of Opportunity's micro-financial services, training is a key component. Access to capital for WASH services is essential if families are to implement sustainable solutions to chronic health problems caused by water-borne diseases, but parents and their children also need to understand why it is important. Opportunity is working with women across India, training them to become Community Health Leaders. Once trained, these women go into their communities to bring this vital understanding to others. In 2016, we hope to roll out these same strategies in Ghana, and when successful, into out other partner countries across Africa.
