What is Seed Effect?

Seed Effect is a Christ-centered nonprofit microfinance organization. The mission is to plant the seeds that overcome poverty by providing access to microloans, education, and spiritual discipleship in marginalized communities. It starts with a life, impacts a family and transforms a community. Here’s a great video from Seed Effect:

Why not just give these folks some food or something?

Yep – Food, water, healthcare, and education are mere luxuries for millions in South Sudan. But when you ask the materially poor what they believe poverty really is, the answer might surprise you. They won’t always tell you that it’s a lack of things, but more often they’ll say that it’s a lack of dignity, security, opportunity, and hope. They say it is loneliness, pain, bondage, and powerlessness. Seed Effect exists because people lack access to the hand-up, the tool, the opportunity that could change the cycle of poverty in their families for generations to come.

Microfinance is a tool that can enable the poor to break the cycle of poverty by providing small loans and savings services to support income-generating businesses. With repayment of each loan, the money is reinvested as loans to other entrepreneurs, thereby multiplying the impact of each donation.

Ok, so what does that actually look like?

Here’s an example, a woman may have a business selling hand-sewn dresses in the market. While she’s very hard-working, she is only able to complete a new dress every few days. However, by providing her with a microloan to purchase a sewing machine, she is able to make more dresses, grow her business and better provide for her family.

As Milton Friedman, the 1976 noble peace prize winner, put it “the poor stay poor, not because they are lazy, but because they have no access to capital.”