In most cases the successes are small, steady, incremental, but sustainable. Gloria, an entrepreneur of the Wayuu indigenous group, is perhaps the biggest success story. She was selling tomatoes on the streets of Santa Marta when she received her first loan and several years later her photo was in the newspaper showing her wares to Hillary Clinton in Cartagena (Link to all of Gloria's story here).
In larger settlements it is difficult to assess the impact of TCP Global micro-loans on the community, but in Kabey Fo, Niger, home to 200 Malian refugee families, the impact of the loan program is evident.
Linda Eastman, co-founder of the Casa Colibri Clinic, along with her husband, Jay, used the Casa Colibri FACEBOOK Page to tell her program’s supporters about the contribution by TCP Global.
TCP expanded into Nepal in January 2020. Eleven borrowers received loans in January 2020 and paid the amount plus interest back in full in July 2020. Each member purchased between 350 and 500 kg of seed with the loan for a total of 4,600 kg; this investment will yield approximately 25,000 kg of food from the harvest. For more information on the Nepal program, please see the case study at this link.
The typical progress of TCP Global loan recipients involves keeping children in school, improving the health and safety of the family, home ownership, business expansion, personal empowerment, qualifying for bank loans. All of these are steps out of extreme poverty and indicative of sustainable advancement.
TCP Global has a positive impact on the entirety of each community it serves
The Colombia Project was created with the dual mission of helping impoverished entrepreneurs with micro-loans and strengthening the effective grassroots organizations that serve their communities. What we had not anticipated was how the loan program would positively impact the entire community. For more reading on the positive effects extending beyond the immediate program to the entire community, please read more here
Programs that fell short of expectations provided valuable lessons and were still a success by any measure
The Colombia Project and TCP Global set out to create sustainable loan programs that will continue to serve marginalized communities well into the future. For a variety of reasons results frequently fall short of that ideal. In the first seven years, that failure can be attributed to defects in the loan model. Since 2007, that model has performed well although some programs still fail to achieve longevity. By international development aid standards, however, all of the programs have been overwhelming successes in that 100% of the funds sent were spent as intended, with some sites investing funds four times before the program closed, thus achieving a 400% success rate.
The Colombia Project and TCP Global set out to create sustainable loan programs that will continue to serve marginalized communities well into the future. For a variety of reasons results often fall short of that ideal. In the first seven years, that failure can be attributed to defects in the loan model. Since 2007, that model has performed well although some programs still fail to achieve longevity, usually due to a change in local leadership. By international development aid standards, however, all of the programs have been overwhelming successes in that 100% of the funds sent were spent as intended, with some sites investing funds four times before the program closed, thus achieving a 400% success rate.
Please read more here about our discontinued programs and the impact they were able to achieve here.