Less than an hour's drive from Buenos, in the town of Derqui, where motorways cut across a landscape of an affluent private suburbia, the Fundacion Grameen Argentina has its social laboratory. Using minimal resources they aspire to change the living condition of local families in a radical way.

Neighbors wait for a small credit and some already have received a credit of 350 Argentinean 'pesos' (less than 100 dollars) for their micro enterprise. It may seem a ridiculous amount for a society in which the minimum wage is 400 'pesos'. But no conventional financial institution would dare lend it to any citizen unless he or she was able to produce all sorts of guarantees and innumerable signatures.

Neither Dina , nor Angelica nor Angela, for instance, three neighbors of Derqui, would ever have dared enter the threshold of any bank to ask for 350 'pesos' which they needed in order to open up a small kiosk or to devote themselves to pastry-making, now gaining them revenues of 200 'pesos' a month, enough to enable them to eat and to keep their small private initiative going. The deepening of the financial crisis this year in the country and the end of the artificial nominal parity between the 'peso' and dollar affected the Foundation's funds, says Broder, who initiated the project. Grameen has expanded across various Argentinean areas and could grow further, but it needs donations to be able to increase its number of loans.

Broder, President of Grameen Aldeas Argentina Foundation said ,"We have been able to establish Grameen's idea throughout the country. There are more than 20 replication projects, 14 of whom have already given loans to more than 600 families to help them overcome the desperation of unemployment. More than 100 NGOs are planning the set up of such programs and we have 200 volunteers working to introduce the concept.

We are also supporting replications in Uruguay and Paraguay. In Paraguay, Grameen Aldeas Paraguay has been created with a program that has helped more than 1,500 families. On January 2003, we will start training in Peru, in Tingo Maria. One of our teams will travel to meet with NGOs in Chile considering similar projects. We hope that in the next year we will be able to demonstrate an even more vigorous Grameen Aldeas Argentina."

Extracted from Focus 2004 and reported by Pablo Broder
E-mail : pbsigno@radar.com.ar