World AIDS Day is held on 1 December every year to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS. Today millions of people worldwide live with HIV. Many scientific advances have been made in HIV treatment and we understand much more about the condition. Hopefully it has stopped being the ‘elephant in the room’ – something that we don’t talk about and simply turn away from. Today, an HIV positive test result doesn’t equal death sentence and people live and work with HIV. 

A number of Deki entrepreneurs are HIV positive and especially in Malawi where HIV epidemic is severe many of our entrepreneurs raise children who have been orphaned because their parents have died of the disease. They are active members of the society who work and do their daily duties.

We have come a long way since the 1980s when the virus claimed its first victims but we can still do so much more to increase awareness, fight prejudice and improve education. 

Join us today to support an entrepreneur in a developing country.

This year the theme of World AIDS Day is ‘Getting to Zero’ – zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS related deaths.

Learn more about World AIDS Day 

‘Microfinance Handbook: an Institutional and Financial Perspective’ by Joanna Ledgerwood (now in Google Books) is highly recommended for anyone wanting to delve deep into microfinance. In one volume the handbook brings together guiding principles and tools that will promote sustainable microfinance and create viable institutions. 

It takes a global perspective, drawing on lessons learned from the experiences of microfinance practitioners, donors, and others throughout the world. This volume covers extensively matters pertaining to the regulatory and policy framework and the essential components of institutional capacity building, such as product design, performance measuringand monitoring, and management of microfinance institutions. 

308 pages, World Bank Publications

This Saturday, November 26, is Buy Nothing Day, a day to take a break from spending your money. That money could soon be helping someone work their way out of poverty, so why not make a visit to the Deki website to start lending when you stop spending? 

Buy Nothing Day is an opportunity to take a stand against excessive consumer culture by spending nothing for 24 hours. It challenges us to question the products we consume and the companies who produce them, asking what impact they have on the environment and the developing world. The organisers highlight the inequalities associated with consumerism in the developed world, reminding us that developed countries, which contain only 20% of the world’s population, consume over 80% of the earth’s natural resources. As a result, developed countries are responsible for a disproportionate amount of damage to the environment and wealth is distributed extremely unfairly.

At Deki, we’d like to encourage you to go one step further towards redressing this imbalance. Visit our website on Buy Nothing Day and make a life-changing loan to an entrepreneur in the developing world. Because Deki microloans are all about creating sustainable change, you can expect your loan to be repaid, and in just a few months you’ll be able to recycle your money.

Click here to meet some of our entrepreneurs and get lending. 

In the last year, microloans have been issued to more than 137.5 million of the world’s poorest families, affecting 687 million family members. These are the statistics found in this year’s State of the Microcredit Summit Campaign Report. While acknowledging challenges, the report confirms that microcredit has the ability to change lives on a huge scale.

In light of the record-breaking numbers, the campaign’s aim, “to ensure that 175 million of the world's poorest families, especially women of those families, are receiving credits for self-employment and other financial and business services”, seems well within reach. 

The report also discusses issues affecting microcredit institutions and clients. Authors Jan Maes and Larry Reed write: 

“This has been a challenging year for microfinance… over the last year, we have been shaken as we watched rapid growth in a major market, India, turn into a major collapse in one portion of that market, Andhra Pradesh, which has brought real harm to clients we sought to help."

This has highlighted a number of important issues, including interest rates and the possibility of over-indebtedness. If these issues are not properly considered, it can result in unmanageable situations for borrowers. 

Microcredit has transformed the lives of millions of the world’s poorest people, and has the potential to continue doing so. At Deki, we are dedicated to providing a responsible service that has a positive impact in the long term. As part of our commitment to serving our entrepreneurs as best we can, we have signed up to the Smart Campaign, pledging to follow a set of core principles for their treatment. These include avoidance of over-indebtedness and responsible pricing. The principles represent a minimum standard, and will guide as we work to facilitate a manageable microloan for every Deki entrepreneur. 

Join us to offer a responsible microloan to an entrepreneur in the developing world and change a family’s life.

Dr Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank

Dr Muhammad Yunus, the pioneering founder of microfinance institution Grameen Bank, used his key note speech at this year’s G20 Young Entrepreneurs Summit to extol the virtues of entrepreneurial spirit. 

In the speech, which also discussed his own experiences as an entrepreneur, he expressed the need to include poorer countriesin global decision making processes and the importance of social agenda in business. Dr Yunus said:

“In my opinion, G20 YES is a fabulous initiative, gathering so much energy and momentum from all over the world. Because of their creativity and leadership, provided that they commit to share the value they create, these 400 young entrepreneurs in this room can change the world.”

Here at Deki, we are encouraged and inspired by the sentiments expressed by Dr Yunus. Entrepreneurship is at the very core of what we do. Every Deki borrower is an entrepreneur equipped with creativity, leadership and the will to put these qualities to good use. We believe that everybody must have the opportunity to earn a living to support themselves and their family.

Join us to offer your support to an entrepreneur in the developing world. 

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Global Entrepreneurship Week (14-20 November 2011) is here – something very close to our hearts at Deki. This week we’re celebrating the enterprising spirit of people and communities wherever they are.

We have teamed up with Smarta, a support platform for business owners and entrepreneurs. Every day this week we will be featuring a Deki entrepreneur with their story on the Smarta blog. 

It is much harder for entrepreneurs in developing countries to realise their ideas and potential. They may have goals and aspirations, but with no collateral they are unable to get a loan from a bank. They probably won’t even have a bank in their village.

The good news is that it is much cheaper to start up a business in a developing country. You can lend from as little as £10 to help someone’s business idea become a reality. And, once it’s repaid in 6-12 months, you can invest in someone else.

Come and join us, let’s celebrate global entrepreneurship together through helping a business get off the ground!

On 9 November Deki participated at Envision Bristol Launch, an afternoon buzzing with the energy and enthusiasm of 16-19 year olds from various schools in Bristol.

Envision supports young people in schools and colleges encouraging them to take action and develop their own social and environmental initiatives. It challenges negative media stereotypes of young people through positive action.

The event was fun and interactive with each stall featuring an activity. Deki ran a mini activity based on our core concept: the students chose between four entrepreneur stories deciding which one they would lend to. As lenders know, several factors come to play when you decide who to give your money to – these could be the borrower’s age, gender, strength of their business idea, perceived poverty level, to name a few – and the students’ choices and explanations were as varied as the participants themselves. 

In the end the winning entrepreneur was Mary, a 30-year old Malawi woman who takes care of 8 children and requires a loan for her fish business. She wears a broad smile as she poses by her fish stall.

‘Choose your entrepreneur and explain your choice’ is one of the activities in our brand new DEKI Schools Package, designed to help citizenship studies teachers to engage students in the issues of poverty, international development and charitable giving.

In the afternoon students broke out in workshops on different skills such as campaigning, presentation, public speaking, and event planning.

A big thank you to Envision and good luck with your future work.   

Workers in rural Malawi

According to a report recently released by Grameen Foundation, rural microfinance clients tend to be poorer than their urban counterparts. The report, based on data collected by Bangalore-based Grameen Koota, a division of the microfinance institution Grameen Financial Services Pvt. Ltd, also finds that urban clients tend to move out of poverty at a faster rate.

Grameen Koota is India’s first fully certified user of Grameen Foundation’s Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI). The PPI, a tool for measuring the poverty levels of individuals and groups, was used to collect the data analysed in the report. 

In addition to the findings concerning differences between trajectories of urban and rural clients, the report finds that the poverty levels of those Grameen Koota clients with results from two PPIs improved during their loan period. This was the case across all poverty brackets. 23% of clients who were below the World Bank’s $1.25/day/PPP poverty line at the time of their first assessment had moved above this line by their second. The statistic for those who began below the $2/day/PPP poverty line was 9%.

At Deki we are present in some hard-to-reach rural areas in Ghana and Malawi and aim to expand to new rural areas in the future where microfinance often has a truly life changing impact.

As Trustees’ Week 2011 draws to a close, we at Deki would like to say a huge ‘thank you’ to all of our fantastic trustees. The passion and expertise of everyone who sits on Deki’s board plays an integral part in the organisation, continuously steering us towards success.

Since our 2008 launch, Deki and its clients have enjoyed support from Chair Susan Sparham, a qualified social worker with over 30 years’ experience in the charitable and statutory sectors, Peregrine Willoughby-Brown, an expert on international microfinance, and Alison Godfrey, a qualified chartered accountant and registered auditor with 12 years’ experience in the charity sector. 

We are delighted to announce that four new trustees are joining their ranks this month. Mark Panay, the director of Simpleweb and an authority on all things technological, Barry Horner, the CEO of Paradigm Norton Financial Planning Ltd who in 2008 was voted one of the most influential financial advisors in the UK, Andrew Street, one of the founding Directors of SLR Consulting, now a global player in the environmental sector, and Dianne Dodd, who spent three years in the Peace Corps and is currently Business Sustainability Consultant at Mobility Aids for Southern Africa (MASA), are now part of the Deki family. 

The experience and knowledge of these new recruits is sure to drive Deki further, allowing us to reach more entrepreneurs in the developing world.

If you’d like to get involved, you can join us on LinkedIn, Facebook and follow us on Twitter. 

Woman working at dawn in Kerala, South India

The topic of aid is a controversial one, with accusations that money is often lost to inefficiency and corruption rife. Aid to India, the world’s 11th largest economy, is particularly heavily debated. But with one third of the poor population of the world (those living below the $1.25 a day poverty line) living in the country, it is difficult to argue that India is not still a country in great need. 

The UK’s new aid strategy to India aims to address this need directly by working with people in the country’s poorest states rather than transferring large sums to centrally sponsored government schemes. The Department for International Development (DfID) have announced the intention to concentrate on wealth creation, with a particular focus on working with women. £341m, the biggest portion of the £1.2bn in aid India is set to receive from the UK in the next five years, is to be channelled into projects in this vein. 

Andrew Mitchell, the Secretary of State for International Development, has given Unilever’s Shakti Entrepreneurial Programme as an example of wealth creation. The Shakti Programme, which is similar to the work of Deki in its approach, equips women in India and Bangladesh to sell products such as toothpaste in remote communities. This puts them in a position to pay for schooling and healthcare for their families. 

“Our theory of change is that bringing assets, opportunities and basic services directly to women and girls can break the cycle of poverty passed between generations” said DfID.

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