Five Talents was awarded the Overall Winner at the City of London Sustainable City Awards at a ceremony in the Mansion House on 19th February 2009. Five Talents also won their category “Sustainable and Responsible Finance”.
Five Talents was congratulated on its work in 10 developing countries, helping over 20,000 people to escape poverty by providing business training and small loans using the microfinance method. Tom Sanderson, UK Director of Five Talents said “I am thrilled that Five Talents’ work has been endorsed in this way, and the true honour goes to our project staff in each country who work directly with the clients to help them to grow their businesses and to climb out of poverty.”
Founded at the Lambeth Conference of Anglican church leaders in 1998, created as a long term response to help the poor in developing countries based on need not creed.
Five Talents was established in the USA in 1999 and in the UK in 2005. The name is taken from the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) in which the “good and faithful servant” takes the Master’s five talents and through effort and initiative gains five more.
Five Talents aims to fight poverty in the developing world by creating jobs. This is achieved by providing business training and small loans. The loans start as low as £20 - each one helping an entrepreneur to start or build a small business.
Since 1999 Five Talents has raised over £1.5 million to fund micro-credit programmes currently and to provide training in business skills, including basic book-keeping, planning, appraisal, marketing and stewardship. Established businesses include farming, dress-making, retailing, hair-dressing and brick-making, it currently supports 20,506 people through 13 microfinance partners in 10 countries in the developing world as follows:
- Uganda
- Kenya (2 partners)
- Dominican Republic
- Philippines
- India (3 partners)
- Tanzania
- Sudan
- Indonesia
- Peru
- Bolivia
Women form 60% of loan group members. Payment rates by project are in the range of 85-100%. Each loan can impact as many as 10 people once family members and employees are taken into account.
Five Talents aims to reach 70,000 entrepreneurs with savings and loan programmes in 14 countries in the developing world by the end of 2012.
More information about Five Talents can be found here:
http://www.fivetalents.org.uk/index.php