Starting An Emerging Markets Fund In Uganda

Welcome to Uganda. From three dollars a day to twenty-one dollars a day, she finished her first loan in two.

But just because you are our best clients. In the beginning, before she got a loan, she only had a sewing machine, but she didn't have the material and the fabric to make things out.

You own the sewing machine and you don't have any fabric, so how are you going to make money?

Nada.

She.

Finished her loan, a six-month loan.

She paid it.

She paid it back in advance because she was making so much money that twenty-one dollars a day. For you who are slow at math, that's a lot of money. And then a top-up is we gave her a second loan for even more money. So she went from like two hundred to three hundred dollars. It's that simple parable of giving someone fish or teaching them to fish. Microloans are how you teach somebody to fish. You have an amazing business and you make beautiful clothes.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Are you ready?

Hello!

Muvule!

Muvule! Muvule! I have just arrived in the Pearl of Africa, Uganda. We've just successfully completed the first full round of loans that we started back in January. It's a 6-month term loan. And now I'm seeing how things are and seeing how our clients are. So far, we have walked the distance of about one city block. We saw 3 markets in a row. The first one was running out of inventory, had so much inventory when we visited that it was a huge market relative to Ugandan markets. We have a market. So here we have potatoes, bananas.

Mm-hmm.

Oh, and chickens. $5 to $7 a day, now $10 to $15 a day.

Now she's saying she can have 3 meals for her family.

She can eat 3 times a day. She can feed her family 3 meals a day. It's the simple things in life. Tell me a little bit about your store.

The loan we gave her helped her out in a way that now she can have more stock.

How has your loan changed your store?

In the beginning, she could, she could only serve like 20,000, but now at least she can serve 70,000 in a day.

So she went from 20,000 shillings, which is about $6, to 70,000 shillings, which is like $21. Like that, from a loan. So a little, a little under 200 US, about 170 US, and it tripled her income. And I appreciate your hard work. Keep, keep it up. Nice to meet you. So this is new stock for her. She didn't have this.

She didn't.

She had, she had a little bit of sugarcane, but not nearly as much. And this was all that she had to sell. 30,000 shillings to 50,000 shillings per day, which is something like $9 a day to about $15 per day. So almost a 50% increase. The 4th one was a lady who had her shack completely destroyed and robbed And she had to rebuild her shack. And even after rebuilding her shack, she made 150% of her previous income. I love learning about how these markets have changed. Looks like these are some spices, tomatoes, onions.

Her stall was broken down.

It was broken down though, huh?

No, they stole everything from her. She had to get another stall here.

She had to rebuild her store. She still increased her income from 10,000 shillings, which is $3 a day, to 15,000, which is like $4.50. It's like a $90 loan for 300,000 shillings to help someone restart from scratch. But is there a compounding effect by many businesses in the same area being helped?

Yeah, sure, because when you— once you help one person, it's like you're only— you're helping that one person and it's to him. So yeah, maybe one business won't help the whole village. Yeah, yeah, effectively. So, but once you help many businesses, it will make the whole village to grow. Yes, to grow as a whole. Yes. And it will help them as a group because most of them are friends, most of them are related or something. So it helps them to grow financially.

So it changes the entire local economy. That's like doubling the amount of money that's floating around this little area, perhaps, more or less. Maybe that's optimistic.

No, it is not, because it really came from them.

We've helped thousands of businesses grow over the last 2 years, and then the pandemic struck and many of those businesses went completely out of business. And people aren't able to feed their families, they're not able to send their kids to school, and some people are even dying. And so we're now at the point where if we don't rush money to help refinance these people's loans and restart their businesses, Then they will have lost everything that they've worked for over the last two years.

And here's some of our amazing staff. This is Barbara, and this is Brian, and here we have Daisy, and they are our credit officers. They're like business coaches within their local communities.

Most women in Uganda are single mothers. And when you see a single mother bringing up her children, paying school fees, working, it is really, really life-changing.

We're really happy with this experience and, uh, the entanglement we get, you know, with people, the rapport they show us, the hospitality. Really so glad and we love Ripley.

It's really amazing how, how these ladies grow financially because It's so touching when you find a lady and she can't do anything. She can't have full meals. Maybe she can't even educate their kids. But once you give them the loans and they can educate their kids and they can have free meals, like proper meals they're supposed to have, you really feel satisfied and you really feel good. And I'm so much proud of them.

You can count on us! So go on our blog, mavule.com, click success stories, Look at some of the pictures and compare them with what you've seen today.

What all of this comes down to is a microloan of $100 can completely change somebody's life by helping them escape the poverty trap. Right now, someone making $1 a day or $2 a day is gonna have kids who don't go to school, who aren't eating well, they're malnourished. And their kids are also going to be making $1 or $2 a day, and their kids will also be making $1 or $2 a day, and they're stuck in this cycle of extreme poverty. The loan that we give them is the opportunity for them to be able to escape from the poverty trap, and it gives them hope and opportunity that one day their kids are going to be able to live a better life and have a better future and be able to take care of their families. All it takes is $100 and you can help a family of 8 people every 6 months.

This here is a classic Ugandan village. Walk with me, let's walk and talk. You can see goats roaming around, chickens roaming around, because what people do, what people do, in fact, a classic loan that we would give is we give someone $100, which allows them to buy 50 chickens. Now, some people are very strategic. They plan this out before Christmas because in Uganda you eat chicken for Christmas. It's like the luxury meat in Uganda. So what they'll do is they'll plan it out. Chickens take about 5 months to grow, so they'll get their loan in, uh, like June or July, and they'll buy 50 chicks, and that costs them $100. Then around Christmas time They can sell those chicks. Oh, by the way, all the feed and everything cost is included in that $100 as well. And then as their loan passes after 6 months, Christmas comes. And for Christmas, they can sell the chickens that they initially bought for $100 and resell everything for $400. So they make 4 times their money over the course of 4 months. Now, what we do after that Is we will top them up. And so if they borrowed $100, we would give them $150 or $200 depending on how their business was actually doing. And so you can think about this, they made $300 profit from $100, we top them up, maybe they're at $200, we top them up after that, that's then $150. Now that means within 3 years they can go from making really not much at all to an additional $300 for every 6 months to, in over an 18-month period, they can be making $900 every 6 months because they're using their loans correctly. Now it's super important to realize that people have these different circumstances in life. You know, people get sick and sometimes they have kids that need to go to school, sometimes they don't. And so their ability in order to reinvest the loan really depends on some random circumstance. So not everybody's gonna be able to take a $100 loan, make $300 in 6 months, and then top up 3 more times until they're making $900 every 6 months. But some people do. And those who don't, they still are making massive increases in the loan, whether it be 50% or 500%. And the biggest that we've seen today is 700%. And that's in— that was in 2 months. And she topped up again. Now it's 6 months after her initial loan, and she is living such a better life where she's actually able to feed her family, eat 3 square meals. And it's those simple things that we're doing for them where we're not giving them— we're not giving them clothes in order to clothe them. We are giving them the capacity, the capability in order to make their own clothes. It's that simple parable of giving someone fish or teaching them to fish. Microloans are how you teach somebody to fish. Thank you. Thank you, everybody.