The Chiredze Building Project

Story

The Microfinance team in Mutare is our second longest microfinance site. To date this site has created over 500 small businesses and thereby changed the lives of over 2500 people. The team consist of 5 trustees who are unpaid volunteers and one microfinance manager with a part time assistant. There are many challenges facing the team, including adverse economic conditions, loan defaults and  corruption. One of the major issues is generating enough management fees out of the existing loan portfolio to pay the staff costs and administration. Additionally there is the problem of loan defaults which threaten to decrease the size of the loan portfolio. Because of this, Microlend Australia offers to finance a larger project that is directly owned by the microfinance centre. Hence the proposed Chiredze project. Once the proposed commercial building is finished, it should provide enough rental income to provide this additional required revenue. It is anticipated that after the completion of this project that the Mutare centre will become financially totally independent.  

How microlend help

One of Microlend Australia’s strategies is to provide one larger style microfinance project to its various microfinance centers around the world. The Chiredze project belongs to our microfinance center in Mutare, Zimbabwe. From the picture you can see that the building project is almost finished. Indeed we expect it to be complete by the end of 2018. Once the building is finished the plan is to rent the property out to provide more income to the microfinance center to pay for staff and administration as well as provide more microfinance loans to the poor.