Turame uses a microfinance model to alleviate unemployment and create jobs, prompting a multiplying effect for the Burundi economy. This is a chain that works through four links: provinces, community banks, clients and families. Provinces host community banks, community banks serve clients, and clients represent families. Because of this microfinance model, in each province where Turame is present, tens of thousands of individuals are impacted.
Provinces: There are sixteen provinces in Burundi, and Turame is currently operating in two of them [Gitega and Bujumbura]. Our goal is to expand the microfinance program into seven more provinces over the next five years.
Community Banks: Each community bank serves 30-45 clients and has a staff of loan officers who meet with their clients in community centers or travel to rural areas to disperse and collect loans. There are 66 Turame community banks in operation, and our five-year goal is to expand that number to 630, with 70 banks in each of nine provinces.
Clients: Turame clients use individual loans to launch business enterprise, which creates income for sustaining the client's family and also for repaying the individual loan. [Turame has a loan repayment rate of over 95%.] Currently 4,000 clients, most of them women, are building enterprise with Turame loans. Building more banks in more provinces will allow Turame to actively impact about 28,000 clients in five years.
Families: The number of people in Burundian families can vary greatly, since many family units include relatives, widows, orphans and others whom the family cares for and supports. A typical family taking impacted by Turame has ten or more people.
The estimated number of individuals currently impacted by Turame is 40,000 [4,000 clients x 10 individuals per family]. Over a five-year partnership, our goal is to expand and multiply so that Turame can be actively serving 280,000 individuals in Burundi, giving them a way out of poverty.