Five Talents

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Anglicanism Portal

Five Talents is a Christian Microfinance charity. It provides loans to groups of entrepreneurs, and also offers business training and mentoring to clients. It has attracted notice and acclaim throughout the Anglican Communion and in secular news sources.

1 Organization
2 Projects
3 Group Lending Model
4 Further Reading
5 See also
6 References
7 External links

[edit] Organization

Five Talents has offices in London, Washington and Uganda, and partners with organisations in 8 countries around the world.

Five Talents was founded at the Lambeth Conference of Anglican Church leaders in 1998^[1] as 'a long term response to help the poor in developing countries based on need not creed'.^[2]

The patron is the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. ^[3]

[edit] Projects

Five Talents currently works in nine developing countries, which are: Peru, Uganda, Kenya, India, Indonesia, Philippines, Dominican Republic, Sudan and Tanzania.

[edit] Group Lending Model

Main article: Solidarity lending

Five Talents operates using a group lending model. Loans are given to the group as a whole and so if one person has difficulty in repaying, the others in the group will have to cover their repayments. This system is similar to that originally developed by the Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus, and aims to reach those who are unable to take out commercial loans due to lack of collateral. Typically groups will consist of between 5 and 10 people.^[4] , and the majority of borrowers are women.^[5]