Inspiring Stories of FINCA Clients

Egreen Namusokwe of Lusaka, Zambia, is 57 years old, married and the mother of six children. But each day Egreen’s heart is sad because, as hard as her husband has tried to support the entire family and pay the children’s school fees, his income has never been enough. Because there’s just not enough to support them all, they have had to send three of their children to live with her sister in another village. Egreen’s greatest desire was to supplement her husband’s income, but she didn’t have any means to help her family.

December, 2011
For the third consecutive year, a FINCA Jordan client has been awarded the Citi Micro-Entrpreneur Award for best project in the Poverty Pockets category. Ghazi Al-Khatib of Deir Alla owns and operates a small masonry business where he specializes in recreating models of the historic site at Petra, as well as Roman columns, from artificial stones.

Ghazi Al-Khatib has always greatly respected the architectural wonders of the world, especially the historic wonder found in his homeland of Jordan – the monument at Petra.

Watch FINCA Mexico clients share how FINCA loans have changed their lives.

Erika works 11 hours per day - sometimes more - selling vegetables near the market in Jojutla. With her increased earnings, she is proud that she can keep her three children in school. Erika's hope for the future is to move into a bigger and better stall inside the market, where she could add other produce to her goods for sale and really grow her business.

María Trinidad Rodríguez Pillam lives in a leaky shack made of corrugated tin with her common law husband and their six children in a small village in the township of Sonsonate in El Salvador. For many years, to supplement the meager income her husband earns as a day laborer for farmers in the area, María has risen early each day to grind corn and make hundreds of tortillas, which she sells in the market in Sonsonate...

After Bwalya Chanda’s parents died when she was a child, she and her two sisters moved in with their grandparents. Bwalya soon had to drop out of school because her grandparents could not afford the fees. Instead of finishing school, Bwalya has grown up working to support the family of five. Today, she is their sole provider. Years ago, in exchange for help running her market stall, Bwalya’s cousin taught her sewing and tailoring...

FINCA Afghanistan client Shakila lives with her husband, two married sons and a daughter in the village of Bekrabad, in western Herat in Afghanistan. Like many Afghan families, they had fled to Iran in the 1990s to escape the dangers of life under the Taliban, but returned home several years ago. To help make ends meet, Shakila and her husband started a grocery store, but they struggled to pay for rent and daily expenses...

Since her earliest days, Rosena Lafleur has faced extraordinary challenges with dignity and hope. Rosena grew up in poverty and never learned to read or write. She dropped out of school at age ten because her parents could not afford the school fees and her father wanted her to work to help support the family.
Rosena’s mother taught her how to run a small business and she started selling fish on the street...

Marzia lives with her husband and six children in a small town north of Kabul. A skilled tailor, Marzia has been the primary bread winner for her family for over 20 years, because her husband’s earnings from buying and selling scrap metal are so meager. Unable to afford a sewing machine, Marzia struggled for years to expand her business to improve the family’s living standards...

Saumu Eneza lives in Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, with her husband and four children. Before joining a FINCA Village Banking group, she operated a tiny business selling juice on the street to help support her family. But she had no capital to improve her business, so she contemplated closing it and finding another, better source of income, so the family could afford better food and the school fees for all the children.

Karla Karina Torres Ortiz had been working in a factory for three years, but kidney problems prompted her retirement at 30 years of age. Karla lives in Canton Cantarrana, Santa Ana, with her husband and mother. Karla shares the responsibility for earning a living for the household. Her husband is a bricklayer but since jobs are scarce, so is the income. When a friend asked Karla to join Grupo Comunal Los Comerciantes, she decided to join and use the loan from FINCA to set up a stall selling tortillas.

Majeda Suleiman and her husband were successful Jordanian entrepreneurs, earning a good income from the trading company they had started to support their family. In 2008, however, the company suffered a series of reversals, and Majeda and her husband lost everything. They ended up owing thousands of dollars to their suppliers, and had to sell much of their property to repay their debts. The family’s living standards suffered severely. 

Julio runs a woodworking business that involves his whole family. Julio and his family live in the village of San Antonio de Ibarra, a place famous for its families of skilled carpenters and its rich tradition of woodworking.The day we arrived to visit him, his sons were away in the market city of Otavalo, buying supplies of wood.

Lala Yolchiyeva lives in the town of Ponichala, on the outskirts of Georgia's capital Tbilisi, with her husband, their son and her husband’s parents. To help support the family, she raises vegetables and other crops on a small farm. She sells her vegetables in the local market to people from Ponichala and the area. Lala first became a FINCA Georgia client in 2008 in order to boost her farm's productivity and increase her income to help improve the family's living standards.

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kopaisin Ganibaeva lost her job at a collective farm, like tens of thousands of other people in the mountainous and sparsely populated country of Kyrgyzstan. In order to help her husband support their family and put their two boys and two girls through school, she started her own farm near the village of Kadyrsha in the Karasuu region, planning to sell her produce in the local market.

Since joining Finca in 2005, upon the advice of friends who were once Finca clients, Charity Cheelo has become the successful owner of her own tailor shop in Chilulu. The 37 year old mother of four used her first village banking loan of $63 to purchase the African fiber necessary to start her business. Currently, she plans to apply for a $315 loan, with which she intends to start new business dealings in the maize industry.

Prossy Mukisa supports her four children and her parents with the income she earns from her music shop, where she rents out instruments and hires out musicians for parties and other functions in Kazinga. Prossy is determined to give her children an education so they can seek opportunities she was never able to after her father took her out of school and married her off at age 12 to collect a dowry for the family.

Goharik Martirosyan inherited her traditional Armenian ceramics business from her parents. She has always been very proud of the family business and has been devoted to teaching the skills of pottery and design to all of the family’s children to ensure that its folklore and traditions are passed on to the next generation. Goharik’s efforts have been successful because everyone in the family, including all the children, is a master of this delicate profession.

Ingrid Johana Castillo was struggling for survival. Her small business selling dust rags and dish cloths in a nearby market did not provide enough income to support her mother and two daughters, and though she also worked preparing "paches"-small tamales made from potato dough, covered in sauce and wrapped in banana leaves-to sell, she could not make ends meet. 

Sanilia Casseus used her first FINCA loan of 8,000 gourdes (US$200) to buy an expanded variety of sundry products to start building her trade business and improving her life. She was in Port-au-Prince on the day of the earthquake. Fortunately, neither she nor her family was harmed, but she lost everything she had purchased, which represented a great part of the capital of her business. Soon after the earthquake, FINCA decided to forgive her debts and then provided her with a new loan so she could continue building her business.

Like million of her fellow citizens of Kyrgyzstan and other former Soviet republics, the collapse of the Communist system eventually impacted Tamara Shekimbaeva, when she lost her job as a weaver in an old carpet factory when it closed and all of its workers were laid off. he 1990s were a particularly desperate period for many people in Kyrgyzstan, as jobs became increasingly scarce.