Campaign [ Honduras ]
ONE WOMAN AT A TIME [ Thomasa Valera ]
Here is a story, representative of the first round of loans.
Tomasa Valera is a hard-working micro entrepreneur. Tomasa resides in the community of Brisas de la Bueso, in Northern Honduras. Over the course of four loan cycles, Tomasa has worked diligently to boost the product inventory of her small business, a food stall in her community. Tomasa added to her products home-made tamales, which is a corn based food in Latin America, and with her most recent microloan for L 8000 or $400.00, she invested in cooking chicken dishes. These popular meals have earned Tomasa greater profit and enabled her to improve her family’s overall quality of life.
Before receiving her first microloan for L 2000 or $100.00, Tomasa’s husband was the primary income earner of the household. Thanks to microfinance, Tomasa now contributes significantly to the household income. Tomasa has invested in education for her daughters, ages 10 and 20 years old ensuring the cycle of poverty ends with her. Additionally, Tomasa used part of her earnings to save money and purchase a car. Tomasa is eager to keep working with MyFight’s lending partner in Honduras, the Adelante Foundation, explaining, “I have a vision, I want to open another stall at a different location so I can have two businesses in order to earn more profits. That’s why I am going to continue with Adelante, so I can achieve my goals.”
Due to the fact that providing extensive and detailed narrative profiles on every woman that we lend to through our partner MFIs would be very cost prohibitive at this point, we can only provide a small fraction of the total number of stories.
Honduras has a national unemployment rate of 28% (World Factbook, 2009), 36% of the population living below the extreme poverty line, and a per capita income of $1,700 (Sources: Honduras Central Bank, World Bank).
[ THE BACKSTORY ]
Over the past two years, you've designed shirts, bought shirts, hosted events, shared MyFight with your friends, put us on your couch, and turned a dream into a reality.
As a community, we’ve come a long way, and it’s time to celebrate!
The shirts you have purchased over the past year and a half created a seed fund that will provide microloans to 436 women and their families in northern Honduras over the next three years, AND THAT’S JUST THE BEGINNING! At an average family size of six, that's 2,616 people directly affected! And don't even get me started on the money multiplier effect, economic development, employment, and education.
But we can’t stop there! We’ve got more work to do, and now we have some fun tools to see that it gets done. Our lending partners in Honduras, Adelante Foundation, have offered to help us procure the actual pictures and stories of the ladies that still need to get funded. We’d like to keep them busy.
