Microlend Australia Ltd has a process towards combating world poverty that we believe makes us unique. We invite you to participate in this process, provide feedback or promote us to your friends if you like what we do. Since our funding to the poor is in the form of a loan, one unique feature is that 100% of your donation is sent to an overseas project, and is reused to help more and more people each time the loan is repaid. See below:
Other unique features
- 100% of your donations go towards funding the loans for the poor. All administration and fund raising costs are absorbed by the volunteers and founders of Microlend Australia.
- Currently Microlend Australia is totally run by volunteers. That is, there are no salaries paid which therefore means that administration costs are kept to a minimum. When visiting the overseas sites the volunteers even pay for their own travel and accommodation. Please refer to our annual reports regarding the actual cost breakdown. Would you like to be one of those volunteers?
- Every business created is designed to be self sustaining. Even the overseas Microfinance centres themselves, although not for profit, are designed to become financially independent. This gives Microlend Australia the ability to walk away and create more and more sites around the world
- We charge no interest on the loans issued. There is however a one off management fee (this can be up to 12% of the loan) which gets used to pay the overheads of the overseas microfinance centre. There is no return of the loan or the management fees to Microlend Australia. The overseas microfinance centre is a separate ‘ not for profit ‘ Non Government Organisation and is not owned by Microlend Australia.
- Microlend Australia Ltd has created a number of branches within Australia. This means we can easily duplicate our efforts to raise funds for our overseas microfinance centres. These branches could even be created in overseas countries. Would you like to join one of these branches? Or better still, create a new branch of your own ? ( An overview of our Organisation Structure can be viewed HERE )
- Microlend Australia can see every loan that has ever been issued as well as at what stage the loan repayments are. We do this by issuing each overseas site with an internet based accounting system. This ensures a good degree of control over how the funds (your donations) are being used.
- Microlend Australia provides simple, yet effective training and ongoing mentoring/support for each new borrower. This training even works with people who are illiterate or people without computer skills. The training program also teaches you how to create and model a business and provides you with an overview on how a business should be run. These training modules can be found under our resources section of this website and can be downloaded by you for free.