Local Resident Receives International Humanitarian Award For Microfinance Work

by Jared Cohen

On April 24, Coronadan Marshall Saunders was honored with the Grameen Foundation's Humanitarian Award, for helping some of the world's poorest citizens build small, independent businesses and take long strides towards economic self-sufficiency.

Saunders received the award in celebration of two decades of work in microfinance, during which he started his own microfinance bank.

In his remarks at the recent Grameen Foundation awards ceremony, Saunders described exactly why he found so much satisfaction in assisting poor entrepreneurs.

“When those poor women see the possibility of a new and better future for themselves and especially for their children, it changes everything for them right then, I don't mean it changes things in the future, when their business starts generating income and they live better. I mean right then.

“The wheels turn, the lights come on,” he said. “I simply could not get enough of that.”

Saunders' first encounter with this unique combination of banking and philanthropy came in the early 1990s, when he first read about “village banks.” These were small but functional banks that served a group of very-low or no-income people, who nonetheless have a notion of how they could make money if they had a little starting capital.

After hearing that there were village banks as close as Tijuana, Saunders traveled to see one in 1991. He then traveled to India, where interest in microfinance was gaining momentum.

Everywhere he went, Saunders educated people on the principles of microfinance. He found invaluable support at the Rotary Club of Coronado, and Rotarians contributed heavily to one of his early financing projects, a $270,000 set of grants for 65 village banks in Honduras.

After a Rotary Club talk, Saunders was approached by Coronadans Ed and Betty Law, who would become lifelong friends and business partners. Ed shared Saunders' keen interest in village banks and he offered on the spot to back a village in Honduras.

They became partners in 1999 and in 2001, they co-founded a microfinance bank of their own, Grameen de la Frontera, based in Sonora and Ciudad Obregon, Mexico. The bank provides no-collateral loans of about $92 to nearly 6,000 clients, with a lofty repayment rate that exceeds 99 percent. When the first loan is repaid, clients are allowed to take out further loans, with the condition that all loans must immediately invested in some sort of lucrative small business venture.

There have been unintended, very happy consequences of Saunders' microfinance ventures. In his speech, Saunders mentioned a financing operation in East Timor, a tiny island country in Southeast Asia. While working with Grameen Foundation, he helped obtain start-up capital for a lending operation in East Timor called Morris Rasik.

People who were borrowers at Morris Rasik included a few who had killed each other's family members in past blood feuds. Now, “they were all guaranteeing each other's loans and living together in some semblance of peace,” he said.

The nonprofit Grameen Foundation has operated in 28 countries, bringing microfinance loans to people who need a little bit of help. The notion of microfinance is more or less how it sounds: tiny, collateral-free loans are made available to those suffering from extreme poverty, so that “self-sustaining businesses” will be formed and a vicious cycle broken.

Grameen de la Frontera was modeled after this concept, which assumes that small businesses can survive and prosper, even in poor or barely-existent economic climates.

Saunders joins previous humanitarian award nominees like Her Excellency Tarja Halonen, president of the Republic of Finland (2004) and Her Majesty Queen Sofia of Spain (2000.) He was recently interviewed by a New Delhi newspaper.

“Grameen Foundation's mission is to enable the poor, especially the poorest, to create a world without poverty,” reads the company's mission statement. The Grameen Foundation was started in 1997 by a group of friends who were inspired by the work of the Bangladesh bank by the same name.

The founder of Grameen Bank, economist Mohammad Yunus, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for helping to alleviate poverty in his native Bangladesh.

In the last 20 years, Saunders estimates he has met almost 12,000 microfinance clients across the globe, in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Mexico, Honduras, India and elsewhere.

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