– Executive Director, KixiCredito
KixiCredito is a micro-credit company, licensed by the National Bank of
KixiCredito started in the 1990’s as a project of the non-profit organization Development Workshop
strategies of entrepreneurs who had very limited access to finance.
The research results showed that at the time, displaced persons migrated to the cities to seek refuge from the war. However, these individuals and families found great difficulty in integrating into life in the cities because they lacked access to finance. Hence, a pilot project was created to provide credit to families and individuals who normally had no tangible assets that can serve as collaterals. The results of the study also showed that the main survival strategy of these refugees was to engage in petty trade in the informal markets.
From its inception, the number of our clients has steadily grown, and in the year 2000, we had 3,500 customers. Currently, we have about 30,000 active clients of which 60% are women. Historically, women have always been the majority of our clients because from the very start, we worked with refugees in the IDP camps, of which the majority of the population was made up of women.
In the last 10 years, we have provided about 250,000 loans valued at about US$ 230 million. We now have a portfolio of 50,000 customers and we have the widest geographic coverage of any financial institution in
Our customers are basically small entrepreneurs, small-scale producers, producers of informal taxi services, intermediaries of farmers and city-dweller consumers, home-based business owners such as canteens, etc.
We now want to diversify our product base.
In this meeting, it is important to talk about KixiCasa, our housing finance product, which is one of the latest products that were made available to our clients. KixiCredito decided to offer KixiCasa to its clients after an analysis was made of how clients spent the proceeds of the loans they obtained. It was found that about 30% of the loans clients received were channeled into home-building and home improvement in many ways (e.g., painting and repairing homes, purchasing land to build on or have built on, etc.). It was also found that part of the profits
from their business enterprise was spent on