Risk and Rewarding CHE

All the skits we did to introduce lessons and get people talking about the real problems in our recent training portrayed someone who either couldn’t find a way to get the money he needed for starting a business, someone having trouble selling her products, or someone who had no idea how much money he was making and spending. Talking about money always seems to get people’s attention. But the evangelists we trained this past week with CHE micro-business lessons were impressively engaged in the ideas, considering we were keeping an intense schedule to cover almost 20 lessons in three days (it didn’t help that the first afternoon of training was lost because of miscommunications on schedule and other responsibilities of some of the evangelists). There were a couple factors that made this training so much easier and more successful than the micro-business training we’ve been doing for six months at one of the Bible schools. These evangelists that we meet with at Rev. Spicey’s house all have at least 10 years of experience and have seen the necessity for extra income ideas for their families. They have also all done some forms of small business to build up the resources of their families, despite and because the stipends they are promised from various sources don’t come regularly and don’t amount to more than $60 a month. Finally, they have a regional leader in Rev. Spicey, who is super supportive of the training and has been modeling industrious ways of providing income and church support. 

Discussing savings groups in our training.

Despite the long bus rides, heat, and all sorts of complications, it was so encouraging to see a positive outcome from the training already. The evangelists decided to create their own revolving loan Savings Group, where they have made the commitment to save $20 in the next month from the profit they get from selling some of their recently harvested crops. With six members in the group, they will start loaning $60 to two members at a time for a three-month period. Each borrower can borrow 3x the amount he has saved because he has two people in the group who are guaranteeing the loan repayment. These guarantors have the clear motivation that it is their money being borrowed and the repayment is necessary in order for them to get a loan next. I was also impressed that they decided to make their own regulation to add additional savings every month so that at the end of the first year, by the time everyone has had one loan, they will each have about $65 saved. That will mean that next year they could hopefully borrow from each other about $200, which is some serious money you can do pretty profitable things with. We ended the training with helping them think of all the things they needed to decide clearly in their group’s regulations and also working through a small business planning form. Seeing as they are all resourceful, I’m confident in what they will be able to do even in a pretty informal and fluid small business world. The record keeping, planning, and strategic practices that the CHE lessons brought up will hopefully be some things that put them over the top and help them deal with all the great risks in a successful way!

--El Padre