OFDC in the news

It is probably about noon. The women have been awake since before daybreak and have walked six hours up and down the Himalayan footpaths between their village and the closest town, where each has purchased a little pig. Now the piglets are safely tucked into the baskets, and the women are about to make the six-hour return trek.
Nia Sherar is behind the camera, documenting this moment when, she hopes, the women are about to become successful entrepreneurs. Using a $10 loan from Sherar, each woman is ready to become a pig farmer. Eventually each will sell her fattened pig, make enough money to pay off the loan, and have enough left over to buy medicine and school supplies for her family. Then she'll get another loan for more pigs and eventually will earn enough money that she no longer needs loans at all.
This, at its most basic, is the theory behind the microcredit loan movement. At its most far-reaching, the movement includes the Grameen Bank begun by Muhammad Yunus in Bangladesh 25 years ago. But it also includes small ventures like Nia Sherar's Opportunity Fund for Developing Countries, which she started in Salt Lake City in 1998.
Sherar runs the OFDC out of her home in Salt Lake City's Avenues. She needs to be in the United States to raise money, but she would much rather be living in any of the countries the OFDC serves — currently Nepal, Kenya and Bolivia. Her idea of a good trip? Fly to Katmandu, ride for 17 bumpy hours in a bus, then walk for three days to get to a remote village.
These are the places, she says, that some bigger humanitarian groups don't reach. These are the places, she says, where she feels most at home.
This impulse to travel and help — although these days she prefers the word "empower" — began when she was a little girl in Brigham City. Her dream then, perhaps stirred by seeing something on TV about starving children, was to plant corn in Africa.

She finally made it to Kenya in 1993 as a tourist. She had gone there on a picture safari, to see the elephants and the giraffes, but she was drawn, as usual, to the people. Standing one day at the Jambo Paradise Mall, she approached a man who turned out to be the headmaster of a local school. They later became pen pals, and in 1998 Sherar returned to stay in his village. By then she had read about Muhammad Yunus and the microcredit movement and had traveled to Bolivia to help another Salt Lake woman, Wilma Johnson, administer loans. So in her backpack for the Kenya trip she carried $2,000 — $1,700 of her own savings and $300 from friends — to begin a microcredit fund of her own.
Like other microcredit ventures, Sherar's loans go largely to women, because it is women, she says, who tend to spend their profits on their families. The loans, mostly between $10 and $50, have been used by the Maasai in Kenya to buy goats and gasoline. The goats produce milk; the gasoline, purchased in a neighboring town and carried back to their villages — on their backs — in 50-pound containers, is then sold at a profit. The OFDC also loans money to the Luya women of Kenya to buy treadle sewing machines.
But loans aren't all that women need, says Sherar. At the request of the women in her Kenyan and Nepali villages, she says, OFDC has donated money to help build a women's center where both women and men can learn basic literacy, simple bookkeeping, family planning and HIV/AIDS awareness.
The OFDC has also donated money in Kenya, Nepal and Bolivia to send 1,300 children to school, buying them books and pencils and uniforms where necessary, and paying room and board for children who must study away from home. The OFDC has also helped build latrines and wells and donated some health supplies. "Here's the health clinic," says Sherar, turning in her Kenya scrapbook to a photo of a small table and a few bottles of peroxide and ointments. The group also donates mosquito nets — a $4 piece of netting that may prevent a child from getting malaria.

The OFDC is a very small player in the global humanitarian and microcredit fund arena — "grassroots to grassroots," as she puts it. In 2002, according to the Microcredit Summit, about 2,500 institutions gave 67 million small loans worldwide. The OFDC has given out a total of 400 loans. By contrast, the Grameen Bank and the Grameen Trust hope to reach 10 million of the world's poorest people by 2005. Closer to home, Enterprise Mentors International, which originated out of Brigham Young University, gave a total of over $2 million in loans last year to 13,000 people in developing countries. Choice Humanitarian in Salt Lake City has given microcredit loans to a total of 2,500 women in Kenya, Nepal, Mexico, Bolivia and Vietnam.
Sherar's OFDC operates on grants (currently from the Weyerhaeuser Family Foundation, the Force for Good Foundation, the Semnani Foundation and the Dr. Swanson Family Foundation) and private donations. Unlike some microcredit funds, Sherar's charges no interest. Because neither she nor her board members receive salaries from OFDC, and Sherar pays her own way when she travels abroad, expenses last year were about only $200, she says — a 0.004 overhead rate for the $51,000 donated or loaned.
Sherar is a computer programmer who worked for PacifiCorp before it moved its headquarters to Portland. Now she's between jobs and has taken advantage of this hiatus by traveling again to the Third World. Sometimes, she says, she feels she doesn't fit in America anymore.
In America she drives an '82 car, when she drives at all. In America she can't get used to how much water people waste. She would rather be in Kenya, she says, taking bucket baths and carrying a 50-pound water jug on her back. She would rather be in Nepal, walking 12 hours to buy a pig.