The devastating ethnic conflict of around 2 decades and the terrible destruction of the tsunami in 2004 have ravaged the beautiful island of Sri Lanka. A land of beauty and natural splendor with a friendly, warm and charming people, Sri Lanka has faced more than its share of man made and natural disasters.

I have visited Sri Lanka several times including its capital Colombo and have seen with my own eyes the sufferings of the people due to the tsunami. It caused havoc of epic proportions that had to be seen to be believed. Fishing has always been a lucrative profession on the island but 80% of fishing boats in Sri Lanka were destroyed by the tsunami. The country lost a national source of nutrition and around 170,000 fishermen lost their means of livelihood.

Mahinda de Silva, a fisheries expert, has estimated that the country needs 12,000 of the 21-footers, plus nets and other equipment, to get the industry functioning again. They cannot be constructed locally, as most of the 50 plants for small boat manufacture have also been washed away by the tsunami. A massive restoration plan is needed to rebuild the fishing industry after the disaster. Macro loans for factories and micro loans for fishermen are needed to aid the recovery process.

Jayathilaka has been a fisherman all the 46 years of his life and does not know any other skill. The tsunami literally wiped out his way of life and left him and his family of 7 members in all, in a state of shock. There were no boats, no tackle, no nets, nothing at all to go out to sea and catch fish to feed themselves and sell for sheer survival. There was no way that he could get a bank loan as he was too poor to provide collateral.

It was a microloan from a finance company that saved Jayathilaka and his family. Armed with Rs. 25,000, he bought a 2^nd-hand fiberglass boat and some fishing nets and the next morning bright and early, he went out to sea. The very same sea that had caused such destruction and loss, but it was a bond that could not be broken as Jayathilaka was wedded to the sea. Things could only get better after this; slowly but surely, he began to make profits and returned the initial loan amount. Now he is planning on buying his 2^nd boat and also sending his 3 younger children back to school. His eldest son accompanies him on his fishing trips.

Microfinance is an effective way to help the poor and marginalized in many countries to generate income and finding a way out of grinding poverty. Club Asteria finds a ray of hope in such stories of revival and will continue working for such communities around the world. We trust you will join us on this voyage of discovery to support the many that

Life in the interiors of India is a difficult one, despite the miracle of the country’s economic resurgence. This has always been the paradox of India’s development that while the cities glittered with their malls and multiplexes, one just had to drive some hundred kilometers into the countryside to see a different picture. Small huts with thatched roofs, a dilapidated school building, flickering lanterns or some electric lamps run with generators and a patina of poverty hovering over everything—it’s not a pretty picture.

It was while I was traveling from Chennai to Madurai that I came across this tiny village. India never ceases to amaze me with the diversity of language and culture in the many regions and the multifaceted lifestyles in every district and state. Tamil Nadu is fairly prosperous, but still has its problems of illiteracy, lack of potable drinking water and low living standards. Women have to walk more than 10 miles every day to get drinking water from the nearest well.

The mooing of cows and the clucking of hens echo through the small streets of this village. In one of the huts lives Ammu and her family; her husband, two small sons and her old parents. Living is hard as her husband Ramanan is a farm laborer without a steady income. He is also an alcoholic drinking away the little that he earns. Ammu weaves baskets but it is a battle for survival that is waged every day in the small family. Much as she wants it, Ammu is unable to send her sons to the local school to get an education. Though she is illiterate, she is bright enough to understand the value of getting an education.

It was the teacher at the local government school who met Ammu and her family and spoke to them about microfinance and how it had helped thousands of poor families to earn more and live a life of dignity and hope. He had seen an advertisement and also met with the representative of a Chennai-based micro lending group. His words revived Ammu’s dream of buying some cows and supplying milk to the government cooperative in the next village. With the teacher’s help, she managed to fill the form and get the loan. With the aid of a microloan of around 20000 Indian Rupees (about $450), Ammu realized her dream.

The 4 cows were tethered in the backyard and within one week, Ammu was well on her way to a better life. She had bought the large aluminum containers at the local market with whatever was left of the money and a bicycle. She learned how to milk the cows from her father and how to ride the bicycle from Ramanan. Filled with hope, she took  the containers with the sweet, fresh milk from her own cows and cycled to the milk collection center every day to sell it. She would then cycle back with the notes rustling inside her small, cloth purse, a sign of better things to come.

Microloans are small loans by Western standards, but are enough to change the lives of many in the poor or developing countries. Ammu’s sons now go to school and her mother has a new pair of spectacles. Her father happily looks after the 4 cows and Ammu has now returned her loan and plans to buy 2 more. The future looks bright and all because of a small amount of money and a dream.

Club Asteria helps the realization of such dreams and brings hope and joy to millions around the world. Join us today and become part of this inspiring effort to help those in need.

Some of the poorest people in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa. Here, small things make a big difference. A few dollars from a middle-class American family may mean very little, but contributed to an African aid agency on a regular basis, may mean the difference between life and death. But how do you sustain that over the long run? Where there is need, aid must be given. But it doesn’t really address the root problem—what is causing that desperate poverty. Microfinance programs targeted at these extremely poor areas not only help feed starving families, they help them find ways to help themselves.

Part of the challenge is finding people to fund these microfinance programs, but the bigger challenge is making people in the poor targeted communities aware that the opportunity exists for them. Even when the money is available, many individuals in the poorest communities just don’t know it’s there.

A Gallup poll asked whether residents of sub-Saharan African countries whether they were aware of microfinance opportunities in their communities. At the top of the response curve, a majority of residents of Malawi, Uganda, Kenya, and Senegal indicated that they were aware of the programs. But residents of Ivory Coast, Congo Kinshasa, and Zimbabwe were a lot less likely to be aware of the programs’ existence.

What does all this mean? Statistics are interesting, but there are people behind them. The poorest, and least educated groups of people who need microfinance programs the most, are least likely to know about the opportunity. The Gallup poll indicated that there were 6.5 million microfinance borrowers in sub-Saharan Africa at the end of 2008, and this is heartening. But, this represents only three percent of the potential market—so there’s a long way to go.

We need to create more microfinance programs, and encourage more people to fund them; but more importantly, we need to make a better effort to reach the groups that need them. Can you imagine what it must be like to be living in desperate poverty, watching your children slowly starving to death, thinking that there is no way out—and then getting wind of a microfinance program that could help you feed your family? What wonderful news that would be! Outreach programs throughout Africa are starting to get the word out, and expanding the role of microfinance throughout the continent.

But microfinance is more than money, and the effects of these programs go far beyond simply giving people the means to generate a modest income. That in itself is noble enough—but it’s just the beginning. It’s about restoring people’s self-worth and self-respect. In places where rape is an everyday part of warfare, the female victims continue suffering in so many ways, sometimes even being rejected by their own communities and their own families. But it’s amazing what a little self-esteem can do for a person. In the Congo, I’ve seen how these programs go far beyond their intended goal—giving women back their position in society, and restoring their self-worth after falling victim to this horrible crime.

The money itself isn’t the vehicle of restoration, it’s the empowerment that it brings. In this way, these microcredit programs bring far more benefit than was even intended. Club Asteria is actively working to promote microcredit programs in the poorest parts of Africa, and I’ve had a chance to see some of these amazing success stories, where poor women have received not only a means of income—but restoration of their identities. I encourage you to continue to support our efforts to bring self-respect to the world’s poorest and most unfortunate people.

Tags: congo kinshasa, ivory coast, entrepreneurial education, root problem

I’d like to tell you a story from two different sides. While in Thailand I spent some time with an expatriate who was living in Bangkok. By all measures, a pretty good guy. He was good to his family, didn’t have a violent bone in his body, and his friends thought highly of him. He was the guy you’d say “would give you the shirt off his back.”

His life in Thailand was great. He enjoyed having a big house just outside of Chiang Mai, and since he was semi-retired, had plenty of time to enjoy the tropical country and make frequent trips to the sea. He was the envy of his friends back home in cold and snowy Chicago. Back there, he was just an ordinary working man, and when he retired, he was granted a small pension. Together with social security, he found that in Chicago it was barely enough to live on. He tried it for about a year, but soon got tired of his small apartment, and having to pinch pennies to get by. He took his savings and moved to Thailand, where he met a lovely younger Thai lady and married her, rented a spacious house with a yard that had palm trees in it, and employed a full-time housekeeper.

One thing he always boasted about to his friends back home was having a housekeeper. He never had household help back home, nor did any of his friends. It just wasn’t part of his reality. We were visiting one day and I heard him on the phone to one of his friends back in Chicago. “Yeah,” he said. “I got a housekeeper now, full-time, it’s great! And what’s even better is that it just costs me $150 a month!” It was almost as if he were talking about getting a bargain on a household appliance rather than an actual person’s services.

Of course, in Thailand that’s about the going rate, and it might be even less if the housekeeper is a Burmese immigrant. It just wouldn’t occur to most people that this amount of money causes families to live in desperate poverty. I’ve talked to a lot of people with housekeepers in Thailand, and very few of them have considered paying more than the going rate. It’s not that they’re skinflints, most of them are nice people, but they’re just buying a service at the going rate and don’t think any more of it.

A lot of these housekeepers don’t speak much English and I don’t speak very much Thai, but one day I did encounter a friend’s housekeeper with whom I was able to communicate. With no education to speak of, Lek, my acquaintance’s 28-year-old housekeeper, didn’t have a lot of options and was grateful for the job, which really wasn’t too hard, since her boss was an older single man whose house was never that messy to begin with. Lek still lived with her parents and four sisters. “I’d like to have a business some day,” she said. She dreamed of having a little shophouse with a small store and noodle shop. She and her family had often talked about turning their older family home into a shophouse, but just never had the resources to do it.

Because Lek and her family didn’t have any education and were unable to read, they didn’t know much about microloans, and just assumed that they were for other people who had more money and education. I explained to her that just wasn’t the case, and before you know it, she was on her way to apply.

The day she quit her housekeeping job was the happiest day in her life. With a small loan, Lek and her family were able to open up their shophouse, and it’s made a huge difference in their lives. One thing she wanted to do more than anything was to send her younger sister Fon to the local community college. Fon had just graduated from high school—the first in her family to do so, and that was a big accomplishment, but Lek wanted even more for her sister.

The next time I saw Lek, her shop house was open and she was happily serving noodles to her hungry clientele, and I saw Fon walking home in her college uniform. She met her goal! And what’s even happier about this situation is that when I talked to Lek’s mother, she told me that she even planned to send Lek herself to school.

Microlending makes a big difference with small amounts of money. Club Asteria actively supports microlending programs, and we encourage you to join our program and make more happy endings like this one.

An article in the Bangkok Post gave us some encouraging news. The Thai cabinet has approved a plan to set up a subsidiary to the Thailand Post, to provide microfinance loans to low-income individuals. Applicants need only go to the post office to apply.

Using the post office as a channel for distributing microfinance loans is an excellent idea. So many people who could benefit from microfinance simply don’t know where to apply. Microfinance lenders don’t usually have the big marketing budgets of regular banks, so they’re often harder to find.

Using the post office as a vehicle for application and delivery of microloans isn’t a new idea, and it’s already been used with some success in other areas. Earlier this year the First Micro Finance Bank Ltd. Pakistan inked a deal with the Pakistan post office to renew a similar deal to use post offices to provide microloans. The Pakistan deal has been in place since 2008, and has been very useful in delivering microloan services to rural populations.

In Thailand, according to the Information and Communications Technology Minister, there are about 18 million low-income earners in Thailand who don’t have any access to loans, and the Thailand Post deal will give them a useful and viable alternative. Now, any person in the country will be able to go to any one of the 1,200 post offices throughout the country to apply.

Those sorts of numbers don’t always mean much when you first look at them. Eighteen million people with no access to loans—out of a total population of about 66 million. Yes, it’s an “emerging nation” with an industrial infrastructure, but it’s still poor. As I’ve traveled throughout some of the world’s poorest regions, it always strikes me that “poor” is a relative term. In the United States, “poor” has a completely different meaning than it does in a country that has no social safety net. Thailand does have a minimum wage, which has helped—but again, that’s a relative figure. Minimum wage in the United States would be quite a windfall to a poor Thai working in a textile factory in Bangkok, where minimum wage is 206 baht per day—about US$6.86. That’s per day, not per hour!

Many of these working poor would benefit from a microloan if they knew that the program existed. A big part of the challenge—perhaps even a bigger challenge than actually getting the funding to support the program—is just getting the word out and letting people know that it’s there. I’ve seen it make such a big difference in peoples’ lives. Like 34-year-old Kaew. A mother of four that never made it past elementary school, Kaew used a microloan to open up a small shop in Bangkok’s legendary Chatuchak Market, the largest open-air bazaar in Southeast Asia. Her shop now employs three other family members, and she’s even thinking about starting a second location across town with the help of one of her cousins.

Club Asteria actively promotes and supports microlending programs all over the world. We encourage you to join us, and help make the world a better place.

Emeline was a single mother with 4 children who lived in Puno, one of the smaller industrial towns in Peru. She eked out a precarious living making and selling miniature dolls. There were times when she chewed coca leaves to suppress her hunger pangs, but this was not a solution for her young children who went to bed half-fed on most nights. Her abusive husband had deserted her when she had fallen ill and she had been fired from her job for taking too much leave. Life looked bleak with no hope of a better future.

During a visit to Peru, I had marveled at the cultural richness and heritage of the country, rooted in Amerindian and Spanish traditions. In spite of a sustained economic development, 36.2 of the total population are poor and 12.6 are extremely poor, according to data of the year 2008. There is booming prosperity on the one hand and extreme poverty on the other, a study in contrasts of the colorful country and its multi-ethnicity.

Emeline was skilled at making the Peruvian dolls but lack of money was the dampener, as whatever little she earned was spent on food for her 4 children. She could not afford to send them to school, though she knew that was the gateway to a better future. It was a morning like any other when she switched on her old and battered radio and just by chance, heard that a local microfinance company was giving out small loans to poor women like her together with training on how to start and sustain a business.

Hoping against hope, Emeline registered herself and began the training. She soon managed to write out a simple proposal for her business plan and got a loan of $350. She bought all the items needed for her doll-making; ribbons, cloth, glue, clay and feathers. With some money, she bought a bed so that the children could sleep comfortably. With her training and the extra money, her business improved and her daily earnings increased from $2 to $5. Slowly but surely, her dolls began selling at higher prices and the additional income has brought in wonderful changes in her life. Today, 3 of her older children go to school and there is more than adequate food on the table.

She has repaid the first loan and the second one is underway. She has many plans, as she wishes to have a small provisions store from where she can sell daily needs to the local people and she also wishes to expand her doll business. It is all in her hands now, as the micro-loans have empowered her and she is more confident and full of hope now for her children’s future.

Microloans are small loans by Western standards, but are enough to change the lives of many in the poor or developing countries. Club Asteria helps the realization of such dreams and brings hope and joy to millions around the world. Join us today and become part of this inspiring effort to help those in need.

Hi, I’m Andrea Lucas, Managing Director of Club-Asteria. Club-Asteria is an online global membership organization that provides education, business opportunities, e-commerce and innovative programs to empower our members.  Please visit our site at www.club-asteria.com to learn about our programs and services and our goals for the future and read about our philanthropic activities in the News.

I have now started the series of blogs so I can share my views and experiences with all of my family and friends and the extended community of people that are interested in global affairs.

Everything in my life that I have lived through – both good and bad, has brought me to this moment in time.  I now have the ability to contribute to some of society’s most critical and pressing issues – the plight of hundreds of millions of people that still live in poverty despite the advances in our social network and technology.  Human beings just like you and I who don’t enjoy the simple advantages of clean drinking water, reliable electricity, adequate shelter, the simplest of health care, food and education.

As I have traveled the world in my position in the financial community I have experienced first- hand this injustice and tragedy of humanity.  My life today is dedicated to not only sharing the plight of these undeserved people of the world but more importantly to serve as a catalyst of change to truly benefit their individual lives.  I hope that you will enjoy reading about my many experiences and the people I meet and can lend support to.

My blogs will touch on a variety of subjects, from e-commerce to financial support to philanthropic assistance to most importantly, education that can benefit each of the individuals and families that we are seeking to help.