A letter from WCCN’s Executive Director
As the United States continues suffering the effects of the recession with painful news about massive home foreclosures and increasing unemployment rates, supporters like you are aware of and act upon the fact, that millions of people worldwide are also suffering from the pains of this recession. We sincerely appreciate your commitment and support of WCCN’s work in Latin America.
The economic crisis has finally hit the microfinance sector worldwide. Latin America is one of the regions of the world where the microfinance industry is showing more resiliency from the crisis. However, Nicaragua is at the top of everyone’s concerns, considering the actions of the nonpayment movement, a politically motivated effort that has been aggressively protesting against microfinance institutions. Over this last year we have published several articles in this newsletter to report and try to explain what is going on and why. In this edition of Grassroots Connections we continue this effort to better understand this situation.
During 2009 WCCN was able to continue its successful expansion to other Latin American countries. As you might remember, we started our expansion in December 2008 with our first loan to Padecomsm Credit in El Salvador. During the first four months of 2009 WCCN initiated a second partnership in El Salvador, two in Guatemala and one in Honduras. As this edition of Grassroots Connections goes to print, our Loan Fund Representative in Latin America is returning from Ecuador, where he was collecting all the necessary information for due diligence reports from the first two prospective partners in that country. We are also preparing the ground work for our first visit to prospective partners in Peru and Bolivia at the beginning of 2010. In this edition you will find a very personal report from one of our board members who recently traveled to Guatemala to visit and document the lives of several borrowers from our microfinance partners in that country.
WCCN is also in the process of finalizing the last steps of our name changes. We will be changing the name of our loan fund, the Nicaraguan Credit Alternatives Fund (the NICA Fund) to the Capital for Communities Fund. Obviously the main reason for the change is the expansion to other countries beyond Nicaragua, as the NICA Fund was, name-wise and legally, a country specific fund. The Capital for Communities Fund will have a new Prospectus which will reflect and explain in detail all these changes.
As you can see in the report on our microfinance portfolio (page 10), during 2009 we have continued to increase the loan fund at a very sustainable pace. We are proud of our partnership with you and the twenty one microfinance organizations that are empowering the poor in Latin America by providing financing to their business to lift them out of poverty. I am sure that our common dream, as that of Muhammud Yunus, is that someday poverty will only be found in museums.
Sincerely,
Carlos Arenas
WCCN Executive Director