[Guam] 4 firms start up on microcredit

from Guam Pacific Daily News

By Gaynor Dumat-ol Daleno

One's dream of business ownership can start small -- really small.

In the past several months, four businesses started that way, thanks to a microcredit program that has received further boost with new sponsorship from the Bank of Guam, and the receipt of $1 million in grants to provide small loans to people with disabilities.

One microcredit for $670 has made someone go into the business of selling phone cards. A second microcredit loan, for $1,800, was used to repair a fishing boat. Another microcredit allowed someone to buy a sewing machine for making Micronesian skirts. The fourth one, for about $500, launched a small-scale, grocery delivery business that serves customers without transportation or who have disabilities.
The Pacific Islands Microcredit Institute, being run under the Pacific Islands Small Business Development Center at the University of Guam, is helping to make island residents make their small business ownership dreams into reality.

And yesterday, the Bank of Guam announced a three-year commitment to sponsor the microcredit institute as well as the Women in Business program at the SBDC.

The bank's sponsorship includes the money to operate the Women in Business program as well as the salary for the microcredit institute's Executive Director Denise Mendiola.

Citibank had been the Women in Business Program's sponsor for several years.

"The sponsorship by the Bank of Guam of these programs speaks to the bank's historic and continuing tradition of supporting the development of individuals seeking to start and sustain businesses, large and small," said Lou Leon Guerrero, the bank's chairwoman and president.

"The founding of the Bank of Guam itself is a larger example of groups of friends and families who pooled their funds to charter a local bank, and how that small organization financed itself to become the largest locally owned financial organization in the Western Pacific," Leon Guerrero added.