FINCA provides financial services to the world's lowest-income entrepreneurs so they can create jobs, build assets and improve their standard of living. We are an anti-poverty organization whose work is aimed at creating employment, raising family incomes, and reducing poverty worldwide.
 
We offer small loans and other products to those turned down by traditional banks, believing that even the poor have a right to financial services. With these loans, families can invest in, and build, their own small businesses and their income-earning capacity. Worldwide, our clients post repayment rates over 97 percent.
 
FINCA pioneered the "Village Banking method" of credit delivery, now used by hundreds of organizations worldwide. Our programs reach the poor in more diverse countries than any other microcredit provider. We operate Village Banking programs in 21 countries of Africa, Eurasia, the Greater Middle East and Latin America, serving over 900,000 people – 70% women.
 
We're not a typical charity. We offer loans, not gifts, and we promotefinancial independence, both among our clients and in our programs. Although we are a nonprofit, we operate using sound business principles and an entrepreneurial spirit. Our work enables poor families to create their own solutions to poverty.
Our Village Banking methodology promotes community and individualdevelopment, helping lift entire communities out of poverty. FINCA Uganda (Founded 1992) FINCA Uganda is the country's first regulated, deposit-taking microfinance institution. It serves clients in 24 of the country's 69 districts, in the rural and urban areas of the country, through 22 branches. FINCA Uganda offers three types of credit products, which include both individual and village banking loan products for rural, urban, and peri-urban markets for working capital and business improvements and salary loans. It also offers four savings products, money transfer services, a home improvement loanproduct, and is developing a health insurance product. More than 60 FINCA Uganda clients who lost their businesses in a devastating market fire received payments for claims submitted under FINCA's microinsurance policies, enabling them to rebound from disaster.
 
Over 400 rural clients have benefited from a FINCA pilot project to finance solar energy systems. Electricity has helped clients increase sales and spawn new businesses, improved family health by reducing dependence on kerosene lamps, and even boosted learning by enabling children to study after dark. Given sufficient funding, the project may be scaled-up in the near future.