Economic Development

Economic development for rural communities is at the heart of the Chijnaya Foundation mission. Our greatest success has been in the area of agricultural microlending. While many global nonprofits have expanded banking services aimed at low-income clients in the last two decades, less than 10 percent of call lending to the poor is aimed at borrowers in the countryside. We have pioneered community-level lending to food producers whereby communities themselves help establish how loans are structured, keeping our costs low, our losses near zero, and our coverage in the communities we work near universal. We believe that our small-scale success can help expand much larger efforts by many nonprofits and governments in coming years.