Flaura Ingabire

Thank you for your loan. It has been disbursed to Flaura Ingabire by Vision Finance Company s.a. (VFC), a partner of World Vision International in Rwanda. We are excited to watch this business grow. Over the next 8 months, Vision Finance Company s.a. (VFC), a partner of World Vision International will be collecting repayments from this entrepreneur and posting progress updates on the Kiva website.

INGABIRE Flora has got a loan a of 400,000 Rwf and apart from increasing the stock of beverage of her canteen in a high school of Institute Polytechnic de Byumba (IPB) where students get a refreshments, she also bought a photocopy machine. She says that the business is going well and her profit increased during the last two months.

"When you're responsible, you have to think of different ways to help your family."

These are hardly the words one would expect to hear from your typical 22 year-old university student. But Flaura Ingabire is hardly your typical 22 year-old.

So far, Flaura has run five businesses!

At just 16 years old, Flaura began supporting her family with her first business: a small bar in her village that she ran while home from boarding school over the holidays, but which closed when she was at school. She supplemented the income from the bar by riding a bicycle to local markets on market-days and selling pieces of fabric (that's her second business).

In 2005, Flaura received her first loan from Vision Finance Company, a Kiva Field Partner, in the form of a Village Phone (her third business). VFC leases Village Phones to its clients so that the clients may generate income as customers pay to make calls, and is an important service between rural parts of the world that lack mobile phone service and centers of commerce.

When Flaura finished secondary school, she moved to Byumba town, away from her small village, to pursue her bachelor's degree in management and accounting. For the first year of university, she remained in her village during the week to operate the bar and went to Byumba only on the weekends to attend classes. After one year of commuting, she closed the bar and used the profits from her bar and Village Phone businesses to open a small shop in Byumba (that's her fourth business!). She operated the shop every day, attending classes in the evening.

florashop

In October 2008, Flaura received her first Kiva loan. She had already opened a small canteen at her university where she sells drinks to students and professors (that's her fifth business!). With her loan of $750 along with approximately $600 that she had saved in order to buy a photocopy machine, she expanded her canteen and began making photocopies for her classmates. Here, professors do not have enough copies of hand-outs for every student, so Flaura's photocopier has provided all students with access to the day's lessons.

floracopy

The photocopier purchased with her Kiva loan has enabled her to earn approximately $40 in profit each week, in addition to the $40 per month that her canteen was previously earning and the $40 per month that her shop in Byumba town earns. With her profits, Flaura is able to pay her mother's frequent hospital bills, her sister's school fees, and her own university fees. She is also saving as much as possible which she will use to further expand her business.

Flaura appears at first glance to be just a shy twenty-something, but her ambition and drive reveal that she is an exceptional person who has survived extraordinary circumstances.

Born in a village near Byumba, Rwanda in 1986, Flaura inherited the responsibility of supporting her family after the Genocide in 1994. Though the Genocide began in April, in some regions violence broke out in the first three months of 1994, and Flaura's home was one of the targets of the early violence and was attacked in March of that year. Her father was killed during the attack and her mother was beaten until the genocidaires thought she was dead. Her mother was later found in the house and taken to the hospital. She survived, but with severe injuries that continue to debilitate her, prevent her from working, and continually send her to the hospital.

Flaura, her brother and sister survived the attack because they fled to the bush before the massacre took place. They hid there for 3 days before returning to their home. A month later, once the Genocide began in earnest, Flaura and her siblings again fled to the bush. They stayed in hiding for three weeks before the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) troops came in from Uganda and ended the killings in the north of the country, where Byumba is located. She considers herself lucky that her home town is so close to the border with Uganda, noting that in other parts of the country it took much longer for the RPF to arrive and stop the genocidaires.

Flaura is poised to become the first university graduate in her family. She is also an employer of two people, and an exemplary client of Vision Finance Company, the first international microfinance institution in Rwanda to introduce voluntary savings, individual loans, and Village Phones. Even when discussing her painful past or the weight of her responsibility, Flaura does not reveal a hint of self-pity or bitterness and spends no time lamenting the circumstances that have determined her life.

This spring, Flaura hopes to take out a loan of $2,000 from VFC in order to expand her canteen into a full-fledged cafeteria and to buy computers with internet access for the students to use. There are currently no computers on her university's campus, nor is there any establishment that sells food.

Flaura's ambition is exceptional and her business ideas are savvy. When asked how she came up with each of her plans, she explains that, "When you're responsible, you have to think of different ways to help your family. I am so thankful for VFC and my lenders for making this possible."

Dear Kiva Lender,

Thank you for supporting entrepreneurs in Rwanda! I am happy to be writing to you as the Kiva Fellow in Rwanda working with Vision Finance Company (VFC). VFC has been one of Kiva’s field partners for ten months. This means that in June of last year, VFC began posting some of its clients on the Kiva website to raise funds for their loans. To date you have funded loans for 168 VFC clients, lending a total of $137,850.

Many people know of Rwanda only in the context of the Genocide that took place here in 1994. While that violent history remains part of the lives of everyone here, there is much more to this country than a tragic past. The energy permeating the country is towards growth and development. The microfinance industry in Rwanda is an important part of the growth that is taking place here. Vision Finance Company targets the productive poor throughout the country and has social metrics in place to gauge their effectiveness at improving household standards of living. It has found ways to access rural areas that are overlooked by other MFIs in the country and as a result gets capital to rural entrepreneurs, particularly in the agriculture sector, that have no other access to capital. Ninety percent of Rwanda’s labor force participates in agriculture, so VFC’s ability to target and improve the output of the country’s farmers is imperative to the country’s continued growth.

The country’s growth is occurring alongside its attempts to cope with the Genocide of fifteen years ago. There is a juxtaposition of those who committed the Genocide and those who survived. Prisoners do manual labor all over the country, working on plots of land, building brick walls along roads, and doing various other public works projects in plain sight. They pass through lives as they stand packed in the backs of trucks and are taken between their projects and their cells. One of the most complex issues this country faces is how to go on, develop, heal, when the painful past remains present. After a horrific divisiveness, how is everyone supposed to come together again?

While I don’t have an answer to that question, I do feel like microfinance plays a role. After visiting a few of VFC’s clients, I understood that many were Genocide survivors. It took me a little bit longer to realize that they also serve the perpetrators of the Genocide. As is now the law in the country, VFC does not discriminate. Serving all qualified individuals in an equal opportunity way makes sense in theory but is quite complex in practice. Even the credit officers working with the clients often have their own stories of survival.

I recently met with a client whom I knew was a perpetrator of the Genocide. He was free because he had confessed his crimes, his confession was accepted as true by the gacaca court (a court system that has been established to process trials for accused genocidaires on a local level), and he had completed the assigned community service. Now he was back at home with his family, dressed in civilian clothing, and working in his businesses.

My immediate reaction upon meeting him was that he had such a kind face. I noticed his warm smile and friendly greetings to the staff. Then he shook my hand and it was just like so many greetings I’ve exchanged here before. It was a jarring interview for how totally routine it was. He was not a man you would pin as a killer. This client was the closest I’ve come to the reality that ultimately all perpetrators of the Genocide will be free. He put a face to the abstract impossibility that this country is facing as it frees prisoners from overcrowded prisons and reintroduces them to society.

Microfinance in Rwanda serves an important role as the country attempts to rebuild. Survivors and perpetrators alike are in need of the means to begin again to prevent against history repeating. As lenders to this country, you all are serving a role in its better future. VFC is attempting to collect updates for you on as many of its clients as possible, but in the meantime I hope this email helps you to understand the impact your loan is having. From Kiva, Vision Finance Company, and all of its clients, thank you for lending!

To see all of Vision Finance Company’s currently fundraising loans, please click here: http://partners.kiva.org/app.php?page=businesses&partner_id=117&status=fundRaising&sortBy=New+to+Old&_te=mj. To join the lending team created to support Rwandese clients, click here: http://www.kiva.org/community/viewTeamMembers/?team_id=5273.

Sincerely,

Julie Ross