Skip Coffee Once a Week and Help Africa

Photo by Daniel Hooper on Unsplash

Let me clarify the title of my article a bit. Actually, the title may be changed to: Skip buying a cup of coffee once a week and Help Africa. Now, you might be wondering, how would that work? “If I don’t buy coffee, won’t it hurt the coffee exporting countries, including those in Africa?”

If you don’t buy a cup of coffee once a week, you would save $1 to $2, or even more, depending on where you buy your coffee from, every week. Thus, every month, you might end up saving approximately $5 to $10. Let us keep that saved money aside for a moment, and switch gears to Africa.

During the last two - three decades, while many developing countries in Asia have made good economic progress, the African countries have generally lagged behind in economic growth. Millions of small entrepreneurs, farmers and self employed people in African countries are working hard to give their families a better life. However, they lack opportunities to access capital, which hinders their progress. Often, the amount they need is tiny, e.g. $20 to buy seeds or fertilizer, $14 to buy spices for a small restaurant, $14 to buy shoes to sell, $14 to assemble and distribute maternity kit, $15 to buy cooking oil to prepare food to sell. Sometimes, they may need a little more money, e.g. $99 to buy feed for chickens or $207 to buy fabrics for sewing, however, still so tiny that no commercial bank is interested in lending small amounts to these entrepreneurs who have no collateral to offer. Often, these small, hard working entrepreneurs need money for a short term, sometimes as short as a week or two.

How can You Help Africa?

You can help Africa by giving loans to the deserving, hardworking, small entrepreneurs. You can lend as little money as $1! This is where the money you saved by skipping coffee will come into play. Well, if you don’t buy coffee, you can still save money by not buying any discretionary item, such as tea, pop, lunch, clothing, etc.

How to Lend Money to Entrepreneurs?

You can lend money to entrepreneurs in Africa through Zidisha (www.zidisha.org). Zidisha is an online microlending community that directly connects lenders and entrepreneurs without involving any local intermediary organization, thus reducing the cost of loan to entrepreneurs. An entrepreneur pays only a service fee of 5% for each loan. Zidisha is currently active in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria and Zambia in Africa. For more details about Zidisha, please visit https://www.zidisha.org/faq

To start helping entrepreneurs, you first need to sign up with Zidisha. Then you can login to the site and browse the projects. For each project, it provides details about the entrepreneur, current business, loan proposal, loan info, etc., which are entered directly by the entrepreneur, as shown below.

So, you can scroll through projects and should you decide to fund a project, enter the amount you want to lend (as low as $1) in the Fund text box and click the Fund button. Then, you can pay the amount using your credit card. Once the project is fully funded, the amount is disbursed to the entrepreneur. When the entrepreneur pays back the money, it is automatically credited to your Zidisha account, which you can relend to another project. As many projects are of a few weeks duration, your contribution will have a much greater effect! For example, I have uploaded $248 of lending to Zidisha since I joined it about 14 months ago, however the value of total recycled funds is $860, which has supported 174 projects! The Zidisha entrepreneurs have excellent track records for refunding the loan amount.

Everyday morning, I login to my Zidisha account and look at the amount of funds returned by entrepreneurs in my account. Next, I scroll through the project proposals and relend the money to new project(s). What a good beginning of the day which starts with helping an unknown hard working entrepreneur in the other part of the world! I wish that your day too starts with a smile on someone’s face!