When Mohammed Yunus graduated in 1971 and returned from the USA to Bangladesh he wanted to help developing his country as a professor in Economics at a University. His students performed field studies and discovered that there all the theories about poverty did not actually help the poor people.

He discovered that poor people need to rely on an unfair financial system to provide in their basic needs. Banks are not willing to provide credits for (small) investments, since poor people are not able to show guarantees for their loans (they have no possessions). For loans they have to go to unofficial places were interest rates are enormous. Therefore most of the money earned is for payment of interest and this leaves no oppportunity for savings. This negative chain of events prohibits poor people to develop themselves and improve their situation.

To be considered for a loan one had to sign the '16 rules'. These rules meant to enforce fundamental changes in behavior with respect to finances. Some rules stated that part of the group credits had to be used for agriculture. Others prevented bride treasures when a son was marrying. The latter is a main cause of depths in developing countries.

Yunus's activities took such proportions that he decided to found a bank for poor people in 1974: the Grameen Bank. Nowadays this bank has 4 million customers and is active in more than 50.000 villages with 1400 branches. The concepts of microcredits are adopted by many organizations worldwide. Not all of them were equally succesful.

Our approach follows the general concepts from Yunus. We focus on small scale economic activities. Micro credits apply directly to the people that really need help, and who are usually the most difficult to reach. The scale of the projects keeps the focus at the people behind the credits and results can directly be shown to benefactors.