Affiliates
Fundacion Adelante (Adelante Foundation)
"I used to be so poor that I didn't dress well and I couldn't provide for my children. I couldn't even afford milk for my baby. Now that I've joined Adelante Foundation my life is wonderful - I can now buy milk and sometimes even have chicken with our rice. I had lived in a straw house, but now I've built one of adobe. I've also learned how to provide better for my family's health from the education classes."
Francisca Aleman and about 5,000 other poor Honduran women served by Adelante Foundation are now able to buy medicine when their children are sick, supply healthy food for their families, and purchase uniforms and books so their children can attend school.
Adelante, which means "progress" or "forward" in Spanish, was started in 2000 to help the poorest women in rural Honduras improve their standard of living by providing them with small business loans and business and health education.
On Oct. 28, 1998, Hurricane Mitch made landfall on Honduras' northern coast. Before it dissipated, the category 5 hurricane would kill 11,000 people and destroy 70 percent of the country's crops and 80 percent of its infrastructure. The detrimental effects of Mitch linger on. Currently, 28 percent of the population is unemployed with 48 percent living below the national poverty line and more than 20 percent living on less than $1 a day. Honduras is the poorest country in Central America and the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, behind only Haiti.
Tony Stone, a Stanford-trained engineer, spent most of his childhood in Honduras, and after Hurricane Mitch returned to do what he could to jumpstart the process of rebuilding lives. He structured Adelante on the model of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, which provides small, repayable business loans primarily to women who have no collateral. Stone focused his efforts on the rural poor, which in Honduras make up 70 percent of the population. By targeting rural communities, Adelante has helped deter many rural poor from traveling to urban areas in search of work, which can exacerbate the state of poverty in cities.
Today, Adelante has microcredit operations in six rural areas and has grown dramatically. Since the end of 2004, the number of Adelante's clients has grown by over 92 percent to approximately 5,000 by the end of 2006. Adelante expects to have 8,700 clients and achieve complete sustainability by the end of 2008.
The key ingredient to Adelante's structure is the Solidarity Group, which consists of five or six women who agree to take a loan together. Each woman then serves as a guarantor to the loan with the knowledge that she will be required to "cover" any group member who is unable to pay her installments. The resulting peer-pressure serves as the main deterrent to late payments and defaults.
Solidarity Groups also belong to a larger group of borrowers, known as an Assembly, which meets every two weeks for loan repayment and business and life skills training. Adelante's average first loan is $50; over the course of two to three years, loans can grow to several hundred dollars.
Adelante has an impressive educational program, offering 56 workshops on business, health, and human rights. Adelante has designed a peer-to-peer educational model in which an elected member of each Assembly receives training from Adelante and returns to her group to teach the lessons to her peers. These community educators receive valuable leadership experience and become important resources to their Assembly members and beyond, to the village.
WE is especially interested in providing assistance to women in one historically underserved area of Honduras. In 2005, Adelante began providing loans to women in Intibucá, home of one of the largest indigenous groups in the country. The Lenca Indians are among the poorest and most marginalized in Honduras. In Intibucá, the illiteracy rate, at 40 percent, is twice the national average, as is the childhood malnutrition rate. More than 80 percent of dwellings have no electricity.
Adelante currently serves 557 clients in Intibucá. WE has set a target of raising $25,000 to provide loans to 375 women in the region over the course of 15 months. We hope these loans will allow women like Amida Rodriguez Amador to change their lives. Amilda is 30 years old and lives with her three young daughters and husband in Intibucá. She used her loans from Adelante to start a pulperia, small market, off her house.
"Having a business has made me proud," she says. "My family is very supportive and happy to have more money to buy food. I am starting to save money to buy cement for the floor of our home. Right now it is dirt and is not nice.
"Like the woman who came and spoke to me about Adelante, I too will spread the word about Adelante's help in starting businesses."
To learn more about Adelante, see http://www.AdelanteFoundation.org/
Business Loans for the World's Neediest Women
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WE is an independent 501(c)(3) tax-exempt corporation. All donations are tax deductible.