Authentic Reading and Retelling: Borrower Profile: Annette Michael

Project Enterprise (PE) provides tiny loans and other financial services to micro-entrepreneurs in the New York City area who are living at or below the poverty line. GF-USA has provided both financial and high level volunteer support to PE since 1998. Since then, PE has helped determined individuals like Annette Michael (profiled below) overcome obstacles and setbacks to achieve economic stability and success.

Before she discovered Project Enterprise in 2000, Annette Michael had suffered a string of misfortunes. During the mid-1990s she worked full-time at a bank and ran a small Caribbean catering company on the side to make ends meet. (Annette is originally from the Republic of Guyana.) During one of her catering jobs, she fell down a flight of stairs and injured her back. This injury was aggravated during a car accident in August 1998, leaving her unable to walk for six months.

While on disability, Annette returned to school to earn the licenses needed to sell insurance and investments. When she recovered enough to return to work at the bank, she was fired in a matter of weeks. Unfortunately, this occurred on the same day that she had realized a life-long dream by purchasing a small house. She and her three children were forced to immediately rent out some of their new space in order to make ends meet. When her tenants did not pay their rent, and an unexpected termite problem arose, she quickly found herself $20,000 in debt.

Annette tried to support herself by selling Amway and Tupperware products, but she lacked the working capital she needed to make these efforts profitable. One day, a friend mentioned that Project Enterprise might be a good source of working capital and a way to make contacts with other micro-entrepreneurs. “The reason I joined Project Enterprise,” she says now, “was to get the funding to purchase a laptop computer, because it would make my presentations too potential customers faster and more impressive.”

Annette joined a PE solidarity group and began the business training courses that are delivered as part of the loan process. In February 2000, she opened her own insurance agency, the ACM Agency.

ACM began humbly with two clients, but now serves more than eight hundred. “Persistence is what makes this business work,” she says. “If you are friendly and helpful to your clients, they refer you to friends and family.”

The PE system of networking has played a key role in building Annette’s business. She has an expanding network of clients, from pastry chefs to electricians. “Every single one of my clients knows where I got started. I tell all of them about PE.”

To this day Annette still attends borrower meetings to help promote Project Enterprise’s good work, although she has graduated from the program and no longer needs to rely on micro-loans to sustain her business. In recognition of her unique insights into running micro-businesses in New York and how organizations like Project Enterprise can best support them, she was elected to PE’s Board of Directors in 2002. “Project Enterprise wanted someone who really grasped the spirit of PE, and how important it is to grassroots economic development in New York,” explains Annette. As an avid and vocal supporter of the organization and one of its many success stories, Annette not only grasps the spirit of PE, she embodies it.

   For more information about Project Enterprise, or to learn how you can get involved, visit www.projectenterprise.org. Grameen Connections newsletter, Fall 2003.

Authentic Reading and Summarizing: Ringing in a New Era in Rural Uganda

In March 2003, GF-USA’s Grameen Technology Center launched the Village Phone Project in Uganda. Modeled on the successful Village Phone Program pioneered by Grameen Telecom in Bangladesh, this initiative will enable micro-credit borrowers to purchase mobile phone kits to start cellular pay phone businesses in their villages. Team members Michael Eber, Abser Kamal, and Ryan Stanley have been working diligently on the ground in Uganda to ensure the project’s success. Below, Michael Eber describes the impact that wireless communication is already having on one of the first villages connected through this effort.

Imagine traveling down a narrow dirt track lined with sugar cane, reeds, acacia and banana trees. No overhead power or phone lines block your view, and people walk or ride their bicycles down the middle of the track. You pass a small fire, a water pump and then, all of a sudden, a village!

   Stocked with rice, sugar, matches, soap, notebooks, candy and other sundries, Juia’s shop and three or four others form a rtail strip of sorts and provide goods to a small community in the Masindi District of Western Uganda. But there is something different in this village—in addition to selling basic goods, Julia also provides real time, voice-to-voice connection service to anywhere in the world.

   Julia is ten kilometers from an large communities, and about 20 kilometers from the nearest fixed line telephone. When the sun sets in her village, one sees the moon, the stars and a blue light coming from her new mobile phone. She also has a solar panel, an antenna, and the benefit of training from a local micro-finance organization called SOMED (Support Organizations for Micro Enterprise Development) that helped her get started. Julia, an energetic and joyful SOMED center leader, recently told me about her shop and her Village Phone business, saying, “The Two businesses go well together. People come to my shop and buy goods, (then stay to) use the phone; or they come to use the phone, and then buy some tea, batteries or toothpaste.”

   Julia is new to the business but upbeat and optimistic about its growth potential. She is developing a signpost to attract customers, although this is a work in progress. She has also given her telephone number to others and, as a result, serves as a personal message center for the entire village. In one instance, a neighbor needed to contact relatives outside Uganda and he provided them with Julia’s number. Now, when the family needs to talk with their son, Julia delivers the message for a small fee.

   There is also a school down the road and some of the girls use her phone to call their parents to request school fees or to talk to their boyfriends. People in the area make a living selling cattle, charcoal and maize (corn), and often use the phone to call Kampala (the capital city, which is 200 kilometers away) to verify prices or notify a truck to collect their goods. Julia even uses her phone to order for her shop. Reviewing Julia’s logbook, I notice people from an eight kilometer radius making phone calls. Some, she says, call simply to organize a party or share a birth announcement with relatives.

   Leaving Julia’s village, my colleague’s phone rings. It is someone overseas providing status on an equipment order. Imagine, in the middle of Uganda we have clear communication around the world. It is exciting to see the prospects that mobile communication provides: international commodity prices, weather, and even Internet access. Meanwhile, kids keep playing football, a welder busily fixes a bicycle, and Julia uses some of her Village Phone income to pay school fees and buy new clothes for her children.