Help a poor family to start a Small Scale Business

Project Plan - Discussion with Anbumoni

Anbumoni: He is our former Church Planter and PD graduate, who have a big heart to help people succeed in life. He was a small business owner, he himself produces basic home needs like, soap powder, liquid blue for cloths, cleaning powder, Phenyl, and so on. When I visited him, I saw a successful Pastor, who helps himself and helps other Church Planters as a “Tent Maker”. He is happy to train Church Planters and believers to stand on their own feet by providing them the training to produce the same product in their area.

Area of Operation: All the 7 Pastors are encountering the Poverty issues in their area. Many of their Church believers are living in Poverty. They earn less than a $1 per day. They expressed if this people can be given a $ 125 to start a business, it will change their life completely. 25 people from each of their target area, totaling 175 beneficiaries.

Selection of the beneficiaries: People who earn less than $1 a day will be given preference. They will be formed as a group in each of their churches and will be given training for 6 weeks. We have find or write materials for this training. During this period we will also teach them to save a $ 1 per day. This money will be given back to them along with the money we give to start the business.

Provision and return of money: All of us said that, if we ask them to pay back half of the amount they received will be good. This money can be utilized to support additional families. Thus out of the money we get back from 175 people, again we can help additional 87 people, then 43, 21, 10, 5, 2 and 1. So totally we can help 344 people with the money of 175 people. (Each person with $125 for 175 people total $21875. This is the total amount for the entire Micro finance project. In this some of them will do the soap business).

Challenges: All the 7 Pastors said that they have people who will do this small scale Soap business, but they said they will not be able to market all they product. Anbumoni said, if we can have a common name for the product for all this seven churches, it will possible to market in the neighboring towns. He said we can start this first in Salem. He said he has contact with sales girls, who will sell this product by door to door. All what we need is a small storing facility, which is available for $25 per month.

Starting Point: He said, we can train the potential beneficiaries first to produce the products. The following will be the cost to produce things.

Washing powder to produce 1237kg         : Rs. 41400        $ 1061

Liquid Blue to produce 340 litter              : Rs. 3580           $ 92

Phenyl to produce 1450 Litter                  : Rs. 5030           $ 129

Soap oil – 1450 litter                               : Rs. 4065           $ 104

Cleaning powder – 1083 kg                      : Rs. 4610           $ 118

Basic utensils- bottles-labels –sealing      : Rs. 24300          $ 623

So in total                                            : Rs. 82985           $ 2128