An Exciting Update on the Micro-Credit Project!
Written on 09/19 at 02:13 PM by Andy Posner
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Filed under: brown micro credit
I have some exciting news regarding the micro-credit initiative I’ve been working on. For starters, I just found out that our team was awarded a $2,000 grant by the Clinton Global Initiative! Student teams from around the country applied for grants for student-led initiatives, and only several dozen projects were chosen out of a large pool of applicants. Needless to say, we are very excited to have been chosen, and the $2,000 will be added to the $5,000 that we’ve already received from Brown for a pilot phase.
The Business Model Is Coming Together
Amazingly, that might not even be the most interesting news regarding the project. During the last few weeks we have continued developing relationships with community partners, and we are now on the verge of conducting roughly 6 focus groups with potential borrowers to better understand their needs; their business ideas; barriers to implementation; what they are currently doing for loans (loan sharking?); etc. Our business model is also beginning to take shape. The project team, which now consists of four students and a faculty advisor, will be developing the business model during the Social Entrepreneurship class that we’re taking this semester. We spent much of the summer wrestling with the question of whether or not the group lending model employed by Grameen Bank in Bangladesh can work in the United States; in my last post, I wrote about a possible solution to the limited success of micro-finance in the U.S. Since then, we have had some realizations and come across other models that have enabled us to start figuring out the nuts and bolts of how this micro-credit program will work.
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