Order & donate via

Support our projects in Ecuador

Poor people’s lacking access to financial services forms a huge barrier for sustainable development. Many people do not benefit from the services offered by regular finance institutions due to their small or irregular income. Microfinance means the provision of bank services for exactly those customers: the poor population.

The services include saving and credit opportunities in particular. Microfinance is an important instrument to improve poor people’s opportunities. To be accepted and respected as a bank customer can have a huge impact on the people’s self-confidence. Furthermore an account offers the possibility to save money and to accumulate interests, or to take out a loan to invest it into a small business. With such an account poor people are able to design their future more securely and more confidently. With the help of microfinance even the poorest can establish a secure livelihood. Although these amounts appear to be very small from a European point of view, they reveal to be very significant for the beneficiaries. Thereby microfinance supports forward-looking and sustainable reasoning.

In many regions, especially in rural areas, banks do not exist at all. In these areas people are founding small saving groups that acquire their assets from the savings of all group members. These are then able to give out loans from this pool of savings to people who are belonging to the group.

The opportunities of microfinance are extremely important for sustainable economic growth. With our project “Remittances for Development” we promote the innovative use of microfinance.

For small and medium-sized enterprises in developing countries and in Eastern Europe, one of the major challenges is securing sufficient financial means to support and develop their business. The reasons behind these difficulties have less to do with skills in management and efficient planning. More often, the problem is one of lack of security in the SMEs’ relationships with banks. As a result, SMEs struggle to manage the high costs of (for example) checks for creditworthiness.

We need innovative forms of engagement in order to create opportunities under which our partners might achieve economic development. In addition, we have to support SME to create sustainable levels of income and employment.
Accordingly, Swisscontact draws on the technical expertise of specialists in banking and makes this expertise more widely available so that we can offer ever greater numbers of people financing schemes tailor-made for their local circumstances.

Specifically, we develop tailor-made financing schemes for SMEs by:

• Education for credit and savings cooperatives
• Offering a range of training courses in finance and credit management for the employees of banks and other financial institutions,  targeting employees called upon to manage credit relationships with SMEs
• Supporting the development of credit unions and other micro-finance schemes among members of SMEs
• Helping set up innovative systems for securing SME loans

Here you will find an interesting example of a microfinance project:

Today a growing number of migrants from developing countries work and live in industrialised countries. The so-called Diaspora still maintain strong sentimental and material links with their countries of origin and bear a great potential for the development of their countries of origin. Many of them maintain regular or occasional contacts and directly remit money to support their families, villages or a specific region.

The total amount of worldwide remittances increased steadily over the past decades. The World Bank estimates up to 221 billion US Dollars for the year 2006. But it is estimated that the ‘unofficial' remittances, namely those that are not covered from the national central banks, are calculated to lie at least 50% higher. Therefore remittances reach up to the amount of direct capital assets and constitute around twice the amount of the inflow of official development aid. Alone by their huge volume these remittances might contribute extensively to the development of many countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But in many cases these payments are consumed beforehand and dependencies among people from developing countries are created created. Therefore since a few years an intensive discussion has been rising about optimising the development potential of remittances. Here you can find further information on remittances.

As a development organisation with a focus on microfinance we have long-term experience and excellent expert knowledge in this field. We plead for investing remittances in a way that advances development. A concrete project that aims at optimising the developmental potential of remittances is described here.

Here you can find more information and impressions about the roundtable on remittances that was organized in Berlin. On behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) Swisscontact Germany welcomed together with the Project Humboldt-Viadrina School of Governance and the German Technical Cooperation (GTZ) to the symposium "Remittances for Development".