International Chair Doug Edwards presents MEDA representatives Dean and Chris a cheque for $5000 in support of the microfinance project in Rancheria Nicaragua.
The project with MEDA is to build upon our success with microfinance thru KIVA and focus on Rancheria Nicaragua.
MEDA is a faith based organization with 65 staff located locally but with a mandate of assisting with global economic development coming up with business solutions to poverty. The average length of projects organized by MEDA is 4-6 years and provides institutional funding as well as from private sources. MEDA started out in 1953 with a group of business people investing in a dairy business in Paraguay.
The program that MEDA has in Nicaragua is a microfinance program run thru Micredito (itself a MEDA supported organization that started in 2004 with a $140k grant from MEDA and $7500 from its partners-today is 14 branches and 100 employees with 8500 clients and $16M in assets). The loans will be small (from our perspective) but will have large personal and community impact. Some of the prospective clients include a piñata maker, a prepared food business and a shoemaker (that initially started borrowing enough money to make a few pairs of shoes and now has grown to 12 employees).
Our club presented a cheque to MEDA for this program in the amount of $5,000 specifically targeting the area of Rancheria, Nicaragua.
For further information on MEDA refer to their website: https://www.meda.org/