MicroDreams.org :: Growing MicroBusiness. Empowering Dreams

MicroDreams mission is to empower the world’s poor by providing them with meaningful economic opportunity so that they can work their way permanently out of poverty.

MicroDreams will act as a catalyst to help develop and grow a new generation of Microfinance Institutions (MFI's). With MicroDreams suite of new venture financing and advisory services, these small, young, promising, potentially hi-growth MFI's will grow, prosper and become permanent entities in their communities. They will provide the local poor with small business training, unsecured credit and ongoing guidance and motivation to make their clients' micro-businesses a success. MicroDreams MFI partners will also provide their clients credit for basic housing improvements and for childhood education as well as access to convenient savings facilities and appropriate insurance coverage.

Today, although microfinance is renowned, the vast majority of financing goes to the world's fifty largest MFI's and hence the vast majority of the world's poor remain without meaningful economic opportunity. The execution of MicroDreams vision will help to spread impactful MFI services to every corner of the developing world. Through the success of its partners, MicroDreams will help over 50,000 impoverished families work their way permanently out of poverty by 2010.

A Brief History of MicroDreams
MicroDreams Foundation has its roots in South Pacific Business Development Foundation (SPBD), an MFI founded in the Pacific Island nation of Samoa. SPBD is the first successful MFI in the Pacific Islands region and is well known for its efficiency and its effectiveness at empowering the poor. A sister US-501c3 organization (SPBD-USA) was established in 2002 to help fund the launch and growth of SPBD in Samoa. As SPBD grew and become economically viable, several commercial entities stepped in to permanently finance its ongoing growth. This enabled SPBD to payback its SPBD-USA sponsored start-up financing and gave SPBD-USA the opportunity to expand its horizons.

In 2007, SPBD-USA re-branded and became MicroDreams. MicroDreams (which has the same leadership as SPBD) is now focused on how to help other young MFI's follow the success path to commercial permanence blazed by SPBD a few years earlier. Since its re-branding less than a year ago, MicroDreams has secured three new partnerships with young, well managed MFI's in Bolivia, Ecuador and Uganda and has delivered US$330,000 of financing to these MFI's. Each MFI is now quickly scaling its operations and within 24 months will become similar to SPBD and be a permanently viable MFI dedicated to empowering the poor with a powerful hand-up and not a hand-out. MicroDreams continues to actively take on new partners around the world in its mission to seed the next generation of MFI's to the benefit of the world’s poor.