Helping Small Businesses Build Communities
September 4, 2008
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The Soros Economic Development Fund, a nonprofit private foundation supported by the Open Society Foundations, works to nurture economic growth where it can best help to alleviate poverty and halt the deterioration of communities: among low-income working people with ideas and energy who are disproportionately overlooked by commercial financial institutions. Microinvest of Moldova is one of the scores of microfinance institutions, cooperatives, banks, and social enterprise projects worldwide for which the fund is providing equity, loans, guarantees, and deposits. Artur Bobirke (right), 31, and his brother, Georghe, 25, received a $5,000 loan from Microinvest to improve the farm they had bought and developed with their savings. Chuck Sudetic/Open Society Foundations -
With their loan, the Bobirke brothers built an irrigation system to replace their wheezing Soviet-era tanker truck. They constructed 15 more plastic-covered greenhouses. Inside, they are growing sweet peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and radishes. They sell directly to a stand on the roadside and to the green market in Chisinau. “I can employ three people for a day for what I had been paying for water,” says Gheorghe, who has a university degree in agriculture and interned on a farm in the United States. “This year the return will triple our investment and we will have enough of a yield to export to Russia. I made my choice to return. I want to be here. I want to be in my country.” Chuck Sudetic/Open Society Foundations -
Moldova’s Roma are a group Microinvest is targeting, because they face difficulty obtaining loans anywhere else. Fiodor Zeleni, a 42-year-old Roma blacksmith from the outskirts of the town of Orhei, to the north of Chisinau, has taken his second loan from Microinvest, the equivalent of $3,500, to obtain coal and scrap metal for fashioning farm implements. “My father was a blacksmith,” he says. “I have done the same thing since childhood in Soviet times, but I couldn't get a loan then either. I can sell between 8 and 20 horseshoes and hoes in a day at the town market. Without the loan money, I could do nothing.” Chuck Sudetic/Open Society Foundations -
Dora Rotari was working as an accountant when she noticed the miserable quality of laundry services for restaurants and hotels in Chisinau. She and her husband invested in two washing machines and a dryer and installed them in a rented room. They took a loan from Microinvest for a pressing machine, and later, as the dirty laundry kept arriving, for more equipment and space. “Microinvest was the only company working with beginners like us,” Dora Rotari says. “The banks presented too many requirements, because they are afraid of taking any risks.” Her business now has a contract for the largest fitness center in the city. “They need us to wash a lot of towels.” Chuck Sudetic/Open Society Foundations -
During Communist times, Maria Durbala and her husband grew carnations, roses, and tulips in a greenhouse her husband had built. She sold the flowers in an open-air market in the Moldovan town of Orhei. When the Soviet Union broke apart, the Durbalas acquired their first store, in large part to escape the winter snows and rains and the summer sun. Maria began supplementing the output of the greenhouse by making 30-hour bus trips to Poland to buy flowers and bring them home to sell. Now, after years of work and two loans from Microinvest, the Durbalas own eight greenhouses and two flower shops, with the possibility of a third, and employ 10 people. Chuck Sudetic/Open Society Foundations
This slideshow highlights the work of the Soros Economic Development Fund in Moldova, where it has nurtured economic growth among low-income working people often overlooked by commercial financial institutions.
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