The Finance Issue A story is told of a small boy who was watching a butterfly trying to emerge from its chrysalis, struggling through a small hole against the cocoon which trapped it. The boy had a kind heart, and rather than watch the butterfly lose its struggle, he went and found his mother’s nail scissors and very, very carefully snipped around the remaining cocoon and freed the butterfly. But the butterfly was deformed, with weak wings and it slowly died. What the boy did not realise is that the struggle was the process which completed the final metamorphosis, and strengthened the wings of the butterfly; that the butterfly needed the experience of the struggle to give it strength to fly and to live.
*Hardnosed microfinance organisations ‘care’, they just do it in a different and more-effective way. Our advice to anyone seeking to ‘fund’ the businesses they are helping to train, especially if they are trying to do it from a Christian perspective and at a distance, is wherever possible to use local microfinance organisations (e.g. Five Talents) who can effectively establish and reinforce the necessary, and sometimes harsh, disciplines of business finance. Further advice on Microfinance can be found at Microfinance Gateway and other sites through Google - if you know one you would recommend, please let us know. A viable, and often preferable, alternative to microfinance is a Village Savings and Loan scheme, where the community itself sources the funding, administers the disciplines and reaps the benefits. Further information on these can be found via the Village Savings and Loans Association website or via Care International – the latter of which have been absolutely brilliant at training some of the people we have been working with in a scheme in Kampala. In Reconxile, it took us a while, but we finally learned to focus on making sure that people were equipped to make the best use of what they have got, and not to get involved directly in making financial decisions where we were too easily called to make commitments with little or no impartial information.
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