Integral Office in Lourdes, El Salvador
Back when I was in Guatemala I was suddenly given a great opportunity to meet with a network of microfinance institutions in Honduras. I hoped this didn't mean I would have to skip El Salvador all together, but I couldn't turn this down.
Both Spartan Global and I have lots of loans in El Salvador, especially in food production, which I had been beginning to build a theory to be one of the more successful lines of business for microcredit loans, so I decided it was worth backtracking a couple hundred miles and adding a 2 more border crossings to my trip.
I turned out not to be disappointed. Meeting with Apoyo Integral was a great experience, especially saying they are the first For-Profit MFI {Micro Finance Institution} I've met with. Apoyo Integral is essentially owned by "investors", but the largest owner, significantly greater than 50%, is another Non-Profit based in Honduras. What this means is the people that run Apoyo think about costs, efficiency, long term investment for future returns, very much like any other well run business. The difference is, any profits they make get handed up to the parent Non-Profit which provides a lot of social services, often directly back to Apoyo Integral's clients.
I first met with management team at Integral to get a better understanding of really how they operate, what their priorities are, and what they are trying to achieve as an organization. The best part though was getting to make some field visits, but this time I was accompanying a Kiva Fellow, one of the people who's dedicated volunteer labor helps make Kiva wide network of field partners work. Dennis Espinoza had worked with a field partner in Cameroon for 3 months and was nearing the end of his placement here in El Salvador, so he had role down pretty well. It was a pleasure to learn from somebody who'd seen the Kiva/MFI partnership at work from a key junction in between the two organizations.
Blanca Cisneros forming perfectly round Tortillas
One of the first entrepreneurs we stopped to visit was Blanca Cisneros who has a thriving little tortilla business she runs out of small tortilla kitchen she has built next to her house. I say small because with Blanca, her two employees, three tortilla grills, some areas for cleaning and preparing the dough, another for stacking finished tortillas, along with Dennis and myself, it was hot and crowded.
With the sun beating down on a low tin roof in 95 degree heat it can get hot. Add the heat from three grills going inside, and you've got me with sweat dripping in my eyes in a matter of seconds.
Blanca didn't seem to even notice.
She flew seamlessly from working the maza into formed ball, measuring by memory the exact right size, pressing the maza between her hands into a perfect round disk and then laying it on the grill to cook, flipping another tortilla or two that needed flipping, and back to the maza bowl - all at a speed that let you know she'd been at this 25 years.
Here's Blanca's explanation of the tortilla process (Sorry no translation yet)
Like I said before Blanca has been at this 25 years. She didn't originally plan on having a business as big as she's grown it to. Really she just wanted a way to make some money when she had young kids, but didn't want to leave the house and her children. So what started as a small micro-business, has grown enough that her husband works for her, as well as 2 full time employees and sometimes other part time help. She churns through 250lbs of corn maza every day. In fact one of her bigger non-material costs, is the $8 a day she has to pay the mill to grind the corn for her.
In the future she'd like to get her own small mill so she could cut out the middleman and keep more of the profit for her own business. She see's herself in the future having a business big enough to hand over to her children, she has two of them and also 2 grandkids. Even with fluctuations in the overall economy, people have to eat, and tortillas are a basic staple. While other business have been hurt, with her good prices, good product, and good employees, Blanca has seen pretty remarkable growth even in the last 4 months of 25%.
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