35,000 microcredits disbursed!

35,000 microcredits disbursed since the start of our organization!
August 2023

This will be a brief one. This week, our team in Uganda achieved the milestone of having disbursed 35,000 microcredits since the start of this project in Uganda. Each of these microcredits was given to a woman micro-entrepreneur who used the credit to start or expand a small business, and then repaid the funds so that yet another woman could use them.

Our impact tracking shows that these microcredits work: the women, among the poorest of the poor, increase their income, increase their happiness, and spend more on their children’s education.

Each of these 35,000 microcredits takes a lot of work. Our team of Ugandan women employees work day in, day out in the field to understand the needs of the micro-entrepreneurs, get to know their business, train them, and disburse and the collect the microcredits.

Because the women repay their microcredits (at a 95.5% repayment rate), the same funds can be used over and over again to recycle to ever more women entrepreneurs. That’s how we’ve been able to disburse $8,686,915 in total—and more every week. The women repay weekly, which means that we have to process over 150,000 (small) transactions every year. Not an easy task!

The microcredits are repaid with interest, to cover the costs of operating the non-profit (e.g., the salaries of the team, their transportation in the field, processing repayments). After some difficult years of Covid and bad harvests that resulted in deteriorating repayments and the need for emergency (food) aid to the women we work with, we have now achieved a return to several months of covering all costs with the interest paid. That means that any donation to SYPO can be used 100% to disburse more microcredits.

Thank you for your support,

Duko Hopman
Director
SYPO