Behind On Writing For A Good Reason

Ugh, it has been a pain to try to write everyday, especially since I am trying to quickly complete a project for the organization that I am volunteering for. The group is thinking about jumping into a micro lending program, or at least a pilot program, since they have recently made two loans to two different people and have had a 100% repayment rate. What I've been mainly working on here is figuring out a way to formalize this and use it to augment what the organization already does -- which is to connect artisans to fair trade markets here in Nicaragua and the United States. Many of the models and literature on the subject tend to focus on the Grameen model -- essentially lending money to groups without collateral and using the social pressure of repaying loans instead of the threat of having whatever physical capital taken away. For example, the organization made one loan to help a women rebuild an oven that she used to fire her pottery. That may not work here in Nicaragua since many of the people we work with are not in cooperatives or any formal group per se.



So, the question is how to establish a program to enable the artisans we work with to increase their capacity for producing goods, on an individual basis, when they have no collateral nor any of the "social capital" that the Grameen model employs. God I love doing this stuff!