ProLiteracy's Recent Trip to El Salvador

ProLiteracy staff has had one action-packed week in Latin America!

I (Alesha Anderson, ProLiteracy’s international program officer) arrived in El Salvador to visit village banks and see how clients had been able to improve their businesses since ProLiteracy’s training event in June 2010. Once Lynn Curtis, ProLiteracy senior advisor, and Dean Curtis, of Interweave Solutions arrived, we immediately launched refresher training for field officers of new village banks. The training went very well! Loan officers at 18 banks are motivated to go forward with planned community instruction and community action projects.

FINCA, a global microfinance organization, has recently hired 40 new individual loan officers who had no training or awareness of our project. We were able to work with individual loan officers and create a plan for them to use ProLiteracy’s literacy and micro finance training to work individually with each of their clients. Each individual loan officer will gather groups of their previously unrelated clients to form associations for learning, action, and social solidarity. This is a new idea that struck a very enthusiastic chord for FINCA staff and leaders. With this approach, we are initiating an experimental tool to enable individual borrowers (who comprise about half of all micro-loans worldwide) to take advantage of literacy for social change and Interweave’s business training.

We are really looking forward to tracking the progress made with the 18 original village banks and new client associations started with the 40 new individual loan officers! Our time in San Salvador was quick but extremely productive. We now head to Ecuador to begin planning for a replication of what we have been able to do with FINCA El Salvador—on a much larger scale!

We will be updating our blog in the next few days with updates on FINCA Ecuador and our upcoming trip visiting four of ProLiteracy’s partners in Colombia!