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projects
Rural
Support — Margriet Knaap
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activities
We always try to find new and creative
stimuli to encourage our clients to think for themselves whilst receiving their
business skills. An interactive style of training,
using case studies of entrepreneurial successes
and failures is used, coupled with some theory appropriate to the client's current needs
and situation.
We do not have a large
portfolio of loan clients but can identify groups and individuals who
have built solid foundations, enabling them to deal creatively and humanly
with what life brings them.
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Colourful clothes made by entrepreneurs in
the Karoo
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aims
People living in the Karoo still need to
enhance both the quality and financial status of
their lives.
context
The social environment of people living in
the Karoo is characterised by a bevy of inter-related problems: a lack of training
institutions, few positive role models from their
own communities, widespread poverty and insecurity, dependency on state
grants, alcoholism, teenage pregnancies, little infrastructure, huge distances between
towns, a continuing difficulty in obtaining business credit, general lack
of willingness between racial groupings to work together, a
need for community organisations, and a lack of basic education.
The Karoo is a `land of debt'
spread through all groups and races and our approach has been actively
to discourage the faint hearted and the confused who see small
business and loans as an easy answer in an area of few natural resources,
low population density and huge distances. |
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