SYPO U.S. is a non-profit, 501(c)(3) charity with a mission to help women entrepreneurs in rural Ugan
13/09/2024
This is Nasima.
A 33 year old married mother of four who runs a small restaurant where she sells soft drinks, tea, and food. Her first loan of UGX 400,000 was used to expand her soft drink stock and a second loan of UGX 600,000 to improve the restaurant and cover her children's school fees. Nasima says she is 90% satisfied with her life. Now, she is seeking a new loan to restock supplies and buy materials to prepare fast food like chapatti, eager to further grow her business.
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SYPO is a non-profit, with the objective to help thousands of women in Uganda to start or expand small businesses. The women are micro-entrepreneurs: they want to start a two acre farm, open a little shop, invest in fertilizers, buy a cow or a few pigs - over the years we have seen hundreds and hundreds of different business ideas. We help the women by giving them a small loan - a microcredit - which they repay in weekly installments over the course of a year. The women borrow in groups of five, with individual business plans but responsible for each other's repayments.
The women we help are the 'extreme poor', typically living on less than $2.50 a day. Still, they know exactly what they want and how to help their family; they just need a little starting capital to do so.
SYPO aims to be innovative, transparent and self-critical. We do frequent impact assessments (see below) and actively share findings with other organizations. That way we hope that this project contributes to solving the wider challenge of offering critical financial services to the poor.
SYPO works in the districts Mukono and Buikwe in Central Uganda, bordering Lake Victoria, the world's largest tropical lake. It's a primarily agricultural region, growing coffee, vanilla, bananas, and other crops. SYPO originally started in this area, and it's the region we know best. We grow in small 'zones'; typically a village in the middle and a few smaller villages and farm areas around it. Each zones supports up to 1,000 micro-entrepreneurs. The demand for more microcredits is still overwhelming; we need your help and donations to reach thousands more women and help them start their businesses. See the graphic below for our growth plans.
Although we cover all the operational costs of the project through interest paid on the microcredits, we depend on your donations to grow to new areas and reach more women in Uganda. SYPO is supported by hundreds of individuals through its website www.microbanker.com, and by several institutional donors. Our main institutional partner is Wilde Ganzen, a Dutch development agency with tons of experience working around the globe to support entrepreneurial, grassroots projects with both financial support and expertise. It's the perfect partner for SYPO - we both believe in investing in the potential of local people to fight poverty.
Thousands more women are in need of microcredits to start or expand their businesses and work for a better future for their families. In the next years, we aim to open 7 more field offices (we currently have 9) and reach 12,000 more women with our microcredits. To achieve that, we’ll need your help.
You can read more about our plans, our financial reports and the many ways in which you can support us on our website www.microbanker.com.
