College Students Get Into Microfinance Lending

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This is the VOA Special English Education Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish Imagine that you have lost your job. You could start a sewing business at home if you had a better sewing machine and a little money to advertise. But you cannot get a loan from a bank. In recent times, many people in similar situations have received loans from student microfinance groups. Such groups make small loans for business or personal use. Twelve of the organizations are part of a national network called the Campus Microfinance Alliance. The alliance provides financial aid, technical advice and training programs for its member groups. Each group has between ten and seventy volunteers, many of them college students. They have enabled hundreds of people across the United States to launch small businesses. Vanessa Carter is director of the alliance. She says bad economic times have sped the growth of the college microfinance movement. "This really got started because students were walking off campus, it was the height of the economic recession, and they were seeing boarded up businesses and the effects of high unemployment first hand."In Iowa, a student microfinance group at Grinnell College helps people both locally and internationally. The group started in two thousand seven. At that time, Grinnell student Jeff Raderstrong and some friends raised more than six hundred dollars from other students. The Saturday-night Grinnell tradition of miss

Published 2012-03-19 · Watch on YouTube ↗
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