Impact Investor – Avis d’expert d’Entrepreneurs du Monde
« Armelle Renaudin, co-founder of French NGO Entrepreneurs du Monde, explains how their unique approach to social microfinance is helping society’s poorest create successful businesses that last
- Launched in 1998, Entrepreneurs du Monde operates 21 social enterprises in 14 countries and helps on average 114, 000 microentrepreneurs each year.
- 19,57 families equipped in 2020 with solar lamps and/or efficient cookstoves
- Average loans of €244, with high pay-back rate of 97%-99% despite lack of guarantee
- New InVestisseurs Solidaires fund seeks to raise €12m by September to support 10 programmes
Armelle Renaudin and her husband Franck, co-founders of Entrepreneurs du Monde, have been on a long journey together. From their first encounter as students at École des Hautes Études Commerciales (EDHEC ) business school in Lille, where they realised they shared a passion for helping society’s most disadvantaged people, to raising a large family, all the way to up setting up NGO Entrepreneurs du Monde in 1998.
Entrepreneurs du Monde has expertise in three key areas: social microfinance, supporting the creation of micro-enterprises, and improving access to cleaner energy. It currently operates 21 programmes in 12 countries across Asia, Africa as well as in Haiti and France. According to Armelle Renaudin, it has helped 144,000 micro-entrepreneurs, on average, each year since 2019 and many more before that.
“From the outset our aim has been to arm the poorest in society, living in some of the most forgotten regions of the world, with the skills needed to pull themselves, their families and their communities out of poverty and establish successful businesses that can operate autonomously,” she explains.
Renaudin says that the NGO operates by creating a legal company structure for each of the social enterprises or ‘programmes’ it identifies and employs local people to run it.
With the support of internal finance, training, human resources and legal experts, one ‘expat’ from the Entrepreneurs du Monde headquarters is assigned to oversee the programme until it reaches maturity and can run independently.
Each programme works with local… » Lire la suite : https://impact-investor.com/expert-view-entrepreneurs-du-monde-on-supporting-societys-most-disadvantaged