Story of Maria Elena’s grocery store

Live: 18 loans to fund

This month: 103 loans funded thanks to 433 Babyloan lenders

Overall funds raised: 23 million euros!

Maria Elena

The grocery store

Maria Elena Aguilar lives in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. She is a 35 year old single mother of five and also takes care of her ageing mother. Maria makes a living by running the small shop where she works every day of the week from 7 in the morning to 10 in the evening. In spite of all her hard work, Maria sometimes struggles to make ends meet.

Through microcredit, I was able to increase my benefits and I might even be able to buy my very own house!

The impact of microcredit on Maria’s life : Maria used the credi she was granted to purchase a refrigerator and thus sell more sodas, which are a hit with her customers. By now, she has managed to increase her stocks and she earns between 15 and 30 euros a day! She can easily repay her loan by monthly installments and is even able to save up and work towards reaching her goal: purchasing her very own house.

Focus on… Women’s employment in Nicaragua

The Nicaraguan constitution officially guarantees women equality but reality does not live up to the theory. Women are a target for violence of all sorts and have to overcome many obstacles to access education and health services. Maria’s predicament is no exception and a great number of women in this developing country can only count on their own resourcefulness to make it in their career and personal life.

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Stories of microentrepreneurs

Babyloan is a social business founded by Arnaud Poissonnier, which combines microcredit, solidarity finance and crowdfunding. On Babyloan you make a solidarity loan: you choose a micro-entrepreneur in Europe, Asia, the Arab World, Sub-Saharan Africa or Latin America, who pays you back every month of your loan. In line with the idea of Muhammad Yunus, and his Grameen Bank, we are developing a social microfinance program for microentrepreneurs (mainly women) excluded from the banking system. While the impact of microcredit is complex to measure, we focus on lending low-cost money to our partners, Microfinance Institutions, in order to lower their interest rates. On Babyloan, you can also offer a solidarity gift, or develop your company's CSR approach, via our solidarity challenge platform in particular.

Babyloan edited by ABC Microfinance is registered as Intermediary in Crowdfunding to ORIAS under the n°17005376

Maria Elena

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