Under Swabhimaan, our program to promote financial inclusion in rural communities, we have linked the disbursal of a loan to a financial literacy and assessment module. At Rang De, our aim when implementing projects has always been to bring about long-term change in the communities we work with. A similar motive guided us when we […]
Read MoreA woman stands in her family farm in a village in Ajmer district, in the North Indian state of Rajasthan. Rang De has been providing low-cost livelihood loans to communities in the region over the past two years. PC: Ahinsa The husband chose to answer all the questions we put to his wife, and he wasn’t […]
Read MoreThe scale of Pratham’s work in education over the previous few decades often overshadows their work in fields such as vocational training and livelihood generation. In Pic: Students passing out of Pratham Institute pose for a picture. PC: Pratham In nearly a quarter of a century of its existence, the Non-Governmental Organisation Pratham has come to […]
Read MoreVijay comes from a village near the banks of the great Narmada river in the Dewas district of Madhya Pradesh PC: Ahinsa The best way that Vijay can describe his hometown in rural Madhya Pradesh is that the main road is a good three kilometers away and the mighty Narmada river flows nearby. Vijay is a […]
Read MoreAt PEP Asia 2017, nearly Rs 1.5 lakh was raised to benefit the small businesses of women from rural India. We have a 93% repayment rate on all of our loans They say empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight. If it’s out of sight then it’s out of mind. In our world, the poor […]
Read MoreUnder PSL, agriculture accounts for 18% of all loans made whereas advances to weaker sections of society account for 10% and micro, small and medium Enterprises (MSMEs) account for 7.5% of all loans Did you know about Priority Sector Lending (PSL)? 40% of all loans given out by banks are set aside for the priority sector […]
Read MoreThe Finance Minister Arun Jaitley presenting the Union Budget (Source: The New Indian Express) In the last week of December 2016, news trickled in that the government had cancelled the Foreign Contribution Regulation Act (FCRA) licenses of 22,000 of the 33,000 non-governmental organisations (NGO) in the country. The FCRA license allows an NGO to receive funds […]
Read MoreWe met Prof Yunus for the third time over the past decade We met Prof Muhammad Yunus today! At an event in Bangalore, we couldn’t be happier when we listened to him address a group of angel/traditional investors, social entrepreneurs and other notable individuals in the development space. We expressed our deep sense of gratitude and […]
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Siddharth Agarwal is one of our 11,000+ Social Investors who help contribute to the micro-capital needs of hundreds of individuals from across the country every month Siddharth Agarwal is a photographer, a filmmaker, an aerospace engineer from IIT Kharagpur, a dreamer and a social investor. He is also the founder of Veditum, a non-profit research and […]
Read MoreA trip to the bank used the take up the better part of the day before a a branch set up services in the village When we heard about Chandagalu, a village situated some 100 kms from Bangalore in neighbouring Mandya district that had successfully gone digital with the help of a local bank, we were […]
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