Opportunity Uganda clients like Betty Aute have access to electricity because of the new solar panel loan product.

In November, Opportunity Uganda launched a solar energy microfinance loan to provide power to families currently living with no or unreliable electricity.

Opportunity Uganda is now offering clients like Betty Aute (pictured right), a papyrus weaver and mother of two, a solar panel loan of about $300, which covers panels and installation and is repayable over two years, to bring light to their family homes. The implications are life-changing and endless–when it becomes dark at night, so many productive activities must come to an end. Children can’t do important activities like homework. For these families, evening turns into a discouraging time because there is so much yet to accomplish. The energy the panels have absorbed from the sun throughout the day can be used so that families working their way out of poverty can make the most of their day.

However, light coming into the villages is not only productive but it adds to the sense of hope and encouragement. This helps families in Uganda to feel whole and to have their needs met.

International Market Square, Minneapolis (All photos: Andrew Vick of Vick Photography)

“Side by Side” drew attendees from the Twin Cities’ business and philanthropic communities. Special guests included Don Whittaker, son of Opportunity International founder Al Whittaker; Paul Tshihamba, missions pastor of Christ Presbyterian Church in Minneapolis and a Democratic Republic of Congo native; Mark A. Thompson, vice chair of Opportunity’s Board of Directors; Ted Moser and Sandra Davis, members of the Board of Directors; Frida Mungoma, education finance manager at Opportunity Uganda; and members of the Minnesota chapter of Young Ambassadors for Opportunity (YAO). The event co-chairs were Kelly Palmer and Katie McElroy, who are Minnesota-based members of Opportunity’s Board of Governors. Honorary event co-chairs Mary Lynn Staley (chair of the Board of Governors) and Polly McCrea (former chair, Board of Directors) were honored for their long-time service to Opportunity and its clients. Over a combined total of 23 years, with their husbands Warren Staley and Robert McCrea, these two couples have inspired more than 120 families to become supporters of Opportunity and their gifts have impacted more than 104,000 lives in the developing world.

Event Leadership team, from left: Lori Olson, Regional Director, Opportunity; Honorary event co-chairs Warren & Mary Lynn Staley, Polly & Robert McCrea; Jon Yasuda, CEO, Opportunity

In an evening of community and celebration, one of the highlights for attendees was the remarks by Don Whittaker, who reflected on his parents’ lives and their commitment to heeding Christ’s call by empowering the world’s most impoverished people. Don told the story of how one day, back in 1971, his parents Al and Marion Whittaker were sitting in church listening to a speaker articulate the need for businessmen to help people in need start and sustain businesses in the poorest countries in the world.

On the drive home, Al, who at the time was President of the International Division of Bristol Myers, told Marion he felt he was being called by God to do what the speaker had called for in church. Marion’s direct response was, “It’s about time you stop making rich people richer and start doing something for the poor.” By the fall of 1971, 53-year old Al had tendered his resignation.

Frida Mungoma, Education Finance Manager, Opportunity Uganda, & Don Whittaker, son of Opportunity founder Al Whittaker

Don reflected that his father had exchanged so much to follow this calling. He exchanged a title for a calling from God, a prestigious community for some of the most impoverished communities on earth, and big-name corporate clients for individual clients with names like Ildefonso, Alcantara, Huerta, Kwabena Darko and Namwazi.

In later years, after Marion passed away, Don would visit Al and he would ask him, “Dad, where do you want to go today?” Don would pull out his computer and take his father on a journey via the Internet to see what was going on in Opportunity’s locations. Al would sit in his chair and, with great joy, marvel at everything he saw and heard, saying over and over, “I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it.” Don remarked, “I wonder if the little boy with the five loaves and two fishes said the same thing after Jesus was finished feeding the 5,000: ‘I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe it.’”

Don closed by sharing, “Our family has been blessed. We have been given a firsthand look at what God can do when He touches the hearts of individuals who respond to Him in simple faith …whether they be business-minded women, teachers, laborers or a little boy on a hillside. That is the legacy of Dad and Mom.”

Contemporary Christian musician Sara Groves performs

Moved by the spirit of the evening, long-time contributors expressed their ongoing commitment to Opportunity’s mission. Peter Deanovic, of the national YAO Board of Directors, stated, “I promise to carry on [Al Whittaker’s] legacy, working side by side with fellow supporters, staff and clients to transform even more lives. I promise to do this joyfully and with a servant’s heart.”

Frida of Opportunity Uganda said that this work is so important because “every parent on the planet wants their child to have opportunities to live their best life. And every child wants nothing more than to understand the world, and participate in it fully–body, mind and spirit.”

Betty Jane Hess, chair of the Board of Directors, reflected on Opportunity’s work in its 40th year: “What cannot be overestimated is the ability of all of us to effect positive change in the world and to engage others in this vision. Opportunity is growing. But our growth is not just about going wider, but going deeper. We’re not interested in placing dots on a map, but building strong sustainable institutions that are woven into the fabric of our clients’ communities and countries.”

African musical group Duniya Drum & Dance performs

After all, said Emily Vennerstrom, co-chair of YAO’s Minnesota chapter, “The work of Opportunity International changes lives. It changes mine, it changes thousands of lives in the world’s poorest countries, and I hope that you allow it to change yours.”

If you would like to help support Opportunity’s mission, we invite you to come alongside their work. Visit opportunity.org/support to learn how you can partner with them.

This post was written by the “Side by Side” Volunteer Committee. All photos are by Andrew Vick of Vick Photography.

This was just the first stop on Frida’s U.S. visit, which will take her all around the country to meet our domestic staff and contributors at private meetings and big events, where she’ll share about her work and answer supporters’ questions about life and microfinance in Uganda. Meet Frida Mungoma, who’s speaking tonight at a Young Ambassadors for Opportunity (YAO) event in San Francisco, and next Wednesday at the YAO event A Toast to Tanzania in New York. If you get the chance, I encourage you to get to an event near you to meet Frida.

Frida on the impact and importance of Opportunity Uganda’s education finance program:

What’s the most rewarding aspect of your job?

My greatest challenge:

Coffee farmer Teddy Namagembe

Opportunity’s approach is to help farmers move from subsistence growing to cash crop production with agriculture-specific loans, savings accounts, crop insurance, effective fertilizers, drought-resistant seeds and technical assistance. Agricultural loan officers guide farmers through the distribution process, providing linkages to agricultural markets.

By achieving their potential, farmers will be able to feed their families and become major food suppliers to the growing global population.

Teddy Namagembe (pictured right) works on her coffee farm from 7 a.m. to sunset each day to support her four children. She used to sell her coffee beans before they were ripe to make ends meet. As an agricultural finance and savings client with Opportunity Uganda, she can now wait for the beans to ripen fully and sell them at a greater profit.

Want to delve deeper into Opportunity’s agricultural finance programs? John Magnay, senior agricultural advisor in Africa, led a breakout session at Opportunity’s annual conference two weeks ago. Read about that session, in which Magnay details the tools, strategies and goals of the program that is making great strides towards improving the lives of smallholder farmers in Africa. Watch Magnay’s breakout session presentation in the video below.

Highlights from Anessa Chui’s Presentation

Credit Suisse's Anessa Chui shares her experiences in Uganda on the Global Citizens Program.

I’d like to start by telling you about Credit Suisse’s corporate citizenship. It’s integrated into the way we work and the way we operate. Our corporate citizenship model focuses on education and microfinance. In microfinance, we have a long history in the industry, and we have become the capacity building leader in microfinance.

This capacity building initiative–the Global Citizens Program–was the program that brought me to Uganda. What I saw in Uganda was that sometimes it’s the simplest solutions that make the greatest impact. I think more creatively about solutions now. I hope I was able to show Ugandan staff how to look at problems from a process perspective, so that they can support more customers. I also shared with them that bigger corporations face the same issues of increasing efficiency as they do.

It’s good that we can share best practices, but ultimately for capacity building initiatives to be successful, they need to remain after you leave. It’s all about making them stick. I would like to thank the staff for working with me and for being so open to change.

A bit about Anessa Chui

Anessa Chui is VP of human resources—onboarding and program management for Credit Suisse in Asia Pacific, based in Hong Kong. Prior to this role she spent three and a half years with the CS Operational Excellence team, where she was a program advisor and senior change manager. Before joining Credit Suisse in September 2007, her roles include being senior project manager at HSBC and a relationship executive at HSBC Australia, Ltd. In 2010, Anessa was selected for Credit Suisse’s Global Citizens Program to work alongside Opportunity’s bank in Uganda for three months. She was part of a team that evaluated and set up “Best Banking and Operational Practices” and created a manual that documents process and best practices, which has helped Opportunity Uganda become more efficient across its branches. Anessa holds a bachelor of commerce degree from the University of Melbourne, Australia and a B.A. from Monash University, Australia. She is also a certified Lean Sigma Black Belt project leader.

This session was streamed live at opportunity.org/live. Visit opportunity.org/live during the conference to watch it live.

Ann is carrying only 20 pounds of supplies on her back and staying in rustic hostels along the way. “Trusting that my daily needs will be met by the community along the Camino,” she says, “I will be living a simple life of faith, not unlike the women who are members of Opportunity Trust Groups.”

Explaining her motivation, Ann says, “For over seven years, I have been dedicated to supporting Opportunity International as it empowers women living in poverty in the developing world to create and grow businesses so that they may support, educate, and nurture their families. I am inspired by the miraculous changes that occur in the lives of these courageous women and in their families and communities.” Last year, Ann and her husband Steven Brooks, who live in Baltimore, Md., joined the Board of Governors in order to even further deepen their commitment to Opportunity.

Ann has the generous support of the T. Rowe Price Associates Foundation, which will match any funds (up to $10,000) donated by T. Rowe Price employees to her online fundraiser. Show your support for Ann’s pilgrimage by contributing to her online fundraiser, which is still accepting donations, and by sharing words of encouragement on her fundraiser page.

Want to put your faith into action? Support Opportunity through a walk, run, birthday, or any other event or life challenge. Go to opportunity.org/fundraiser to start your own online fundraiser today.

On this trip, we’ve learned that 50 percent of Uganda’s population is 15 years old or younger. That’s a lot of children to educate. Law requires that all children complete primary school, but the government has not been able to keep up with the demand. The public schools typically have large class sizes, poor facilities and often ill-prepared teachers. Further, the schools are typically located where the population is most dense, requiring many children living in rural villages to walk one or even two hours to school.

As a result the government has sanctioned and encouraged small private schools, run in the immediate communities where the children live. These are not we in the U.S. envision when we think of private education. Though these schools’ facilities may be pretty basic, the children often receive a far superior education than those attending public schools. By funding the expansion of these small private schools with microfinance loans, Opportunity gets a double whammy. Not only do we make small business loans to school proprietors who operate self-sustaining enterprises, but more children get the opportunity to receive an education. Because of this extra value, and because of the number of people that these schools employ, Opportunity knows how important it is to make loans to these school proprietors.

Before going into the field to see the schools, our group of travelers visited the Opportunity Uganda bank in the morning for an orientation on education finance. The director of this initiative, Freda, explained that we made our first two school proprietor loans in 2008, each for about $13,000. This year we have more than 100 schools, receiving a total of $2.2 million in loans.

After the orientation we visited the Rise and Shine kindergarten and primary school. Dorothy met us at the front gate with an infectious smile and hugs for everyone. She is the school’s proud director and co-founder. In 2000, when her mother died, Dorothy converted the family home into a school for seven children, using her life savings of $250 to get it started. Later that year she borrowed $150 from Opportunity International. Successive loans have been for $200, $250 , $2,500 and most recently $4,000. With these funds she has partitioned and equipped classrooms, built a fence, and constructed toilets and running water. Today she has a team of nine teachers and 150 students, including more than 30 refugees from Sudan, Somalia and the DR Congo.

For the next half hour, the students entertained our group by singing songs they had written for “the visitors.” We so enjoyed meeting these children and seeing their school, inspired by young students who one day may be Africa’s future leaders.

Mark Lutz is Opportunity’s senior VP of global philanthropy. He recently returned from a week-long Insight Trip to  Rwanda and Uganda with a number of Opportunity supporters and staff to see firsthand the impact of our Banking on Africa campaign.

Stay tuned to the Opportunity Blog for more from the Banking on Africa travelers.

We meandered down the shopping district, winding our way through an orderly confusion of shops, street vendors and a sea of humanity. It was hot and dry and the red dust rose over the marketplace like a cloud mixing itself with the heavy smell of outdoor cooking and fumes from the boda bodas as they streaked by.

Attending this impressive, well-organized Trust Group meeting, one of the great experiences in my life.

We found our destination, which was one of two wooden covered shelters made from four tree branches and a piece of rusted tin that I am sure had its birth as part of a building. We sat on benches short for our stature.

We waited a few minutes and soon the clients filed in, taking seats and facing us with big smiles, dressed in their most colorful Sunday best. Our interpreter asked us to introduce ourselves, introductions which we delivered in rapid fire as we tried to explain in a few words our place in the world.

The Trust Group chairman opened the meeting. He was a man of 4.8 feet, dressed in green attire, missing a few teeth but laser-focused, in command of his audience, and totally in control of the meeting at hand. You could see in his weather-worn face the intuitive ability to articulate a vision and the presence to lead others. I leaned over to Kevin, a traveling companion, and said, “If they open this meeting by reading the last meeting’s minutes, I will be very impressed.” And with that, a member stood up with his 11×14 notepad of hand-written notes, and standing military straight presented the minutes of the last meeting… Everyone nodded, and then the first order of business was the monthly repayment of loans.

We proceeded to hear stories of the clients’ successes and the beaming appreciation they had for Opportunity‘s services and support. There was a woman who ran a retail banana store, a man who was a banana wholesaler, an owner of a boutique, and a few others. I sat awed, flabbergasted at the formal, Wall Street structure of this meeting. Our chairman, who began with a shoeshine stand, grew it into a retail store, and had educated seven children–three of whom were in politics and four others who had also attended the university–who beamed like the North Star as he told us his story.

Next was the discussion of old business, which began with the review of a contingency fund the clients had created to prepare for a possible default of one of their membership. Then they moved into the current operations of their boda boda messenger, which the group had funded as a new venture and a revenue source. Another member sprang to his feet to suggest that they needed to find and own their own meeting site, a real property investment, and paint it the color of the Opportunity bank. He suggested that they mandate the wearing of t-shirts in their Trust Group colors and create their own brand. He was a marketing officer who any CEO would cherish.

I was so impressed. This whole process was well-organized, carefully thought-out, executed perfectly and, given the environment and personal obstacles each of these clients face, this is an accomplishment that would have rivaled the work of a Harvard Business School graduate. You could see in their beaming faces a clear understanding of what is necessary to be successful. It’s only the “luck of the draw” of their birthplace that this group was not sitting in an office high above Madison Avenue.

To anyone who is working with Opportunity International, or planning to, you must take the time to make a trip like this in order to understand the complexities of the microfinance system, its difficulties and successes, and particular challenges of those persons who happened to be born into a society where opportunity and the entrepreneurial spirit are ill-defined, yet bursting to be released given a chance.

This was truly one of the great experiences in my life…

Insight Trip traveler Bruce of San Francisco, Calif. traveled with Opportunity supporters and staff two weeks ago in Rwanda and Uganda to see firsthand the impact of our Banking on Africa campaign.

Stay tuned to the Opportunity Blog for more from the Banking on Africa travelers.

Dorosera Mukagahima, an Opportunity Rwanda client, is treasurer of her rural Trust Group.

Life hasn’t always been this good. She explained that a couple years ago when she joined the Trust Group her “brain was closed.” She says she was confused, with low self-esteem and without direction or hope. She lived in a grass, thatched hut where she cared for her sick husband and their four children who were all attending primary school.

Her fortunes began to change with her first Opportunity loan of only $33, which enabled her to start selling juice that she makes from bananas. Within four months she paid off her loan and took out a larger one to expand her business. By the third loan cycle, she could afford to make the mud bricks she eventually used to build her new house. Inspired by the success of the others in her group she says she’s no longer afraid to take larger loans and make investments.

Our group of travelers asked her several questions, one of them inquiring about the influence of her Trust Group on the progress of her business. She was quick to respond. Before her loan, as a woman she could not leave her home or spend time with others unless accompanied by her husband. Though those traditional practices are discouraged by the government, many rural women still live within those boundaries today.

Now she is able to be out running her business or meeting with the other Trust Group members. Seeing the added income to the family, her husband welcomes her participation. When she hears the stories from the other group members, she says, it encourages her to “think beyond where she is and what she can accomplish.” The interpersonal skills she has learned in the group, she has taken home and used in her family.

The next day as we took our long bus ride, several in our group commented on the strength, camaraderie and empowerment these Trust Group members gained from working and meeting together. Perhaps here in Rwanda the group dynamic is especially powerful, as members rebuild their lives in the wake of the genocide. Knowing that this genocide pitted neighbor against neighbor, it’s certainly possible that some family members of those in this Trust Group were victims of atrocities inflicted by other families represented in the group. Coming together every week helps brings healing and support like little else can. It is clear to all of us that microfinance is playing a significant role in the restoration of Rwanda.

Mark Lutz, our Senior VP of Global Philanthropy, wrote this post last week while traveling to Rwanda and Uganda with Opportunity supporters to see firsthand the impact of our Banking on Africa campaign. Stay tuned to the Opportunity Blog for more posts from their exciting trip.

Ugandan Trust Group

Amazing. I am just blown away. They have done this on an average loan size of $80. As a group they now have a loan balance of $8,000.

Insight Trip traveler Kevin of Palo Alto, Calif. writes about a Trust Group of Opportunity Uganda clients thinking creatively to further improve their futures. Kevin traveled with Opportunity supporters and staff last week to Rwanda and Uganda to see firsthand the impact of our Banking on Africa campaign.

Stay tuned to the Opportunity Blog for more from their exciting trip.