Microenterprise Access to Banking Services

NORA HUYONG: Model Citizen Builds Profitable Business

It is hard to tell from looking at Mrs. Nora Huyong’s flourishing sari-sari (small grocery) store that earns PhP1,000 (US$20) daily profit that she started it only about four years ago. Her store is located in the city of Tacurong in Sultan Kudarat Province in Mindanao.

In 1999, Mrs. Huyong and her husband decided to open the small sari-sari store because profits from her first business venture – food vending – were too seasonal to provide adequate income for her family. She had been selling barbecued chicken and fried bananas from a sidewalk stall. Since the stall was located next to a school, her customers were mostly students. Business was okay during the school year, but each year as classes ended, she had to close her shop due to lack of customers. This prompted Mrs. Huyong to convert part of her front yard into a sari-sari store.

She learned, soon after starting her sari-sari store business, that the Rural Bank of Tacurong was offering a new microloan designed for microentrepreneurs. The Bank had designed its microloan product with assistance from the USAID-financed Microenterprise Access to Banking Services (MABS) Program. Delighted at the prospect of increasing her inventory, Mrs. Huyong applied for and received a PhP5,000 (US$100) microloan.

Four years later, Mrs. Huyong has managed to grow her small store into a business with annual sales estimated at PhP400,000 (US$8,000). “We started with only a small amount of capital but we poured a lot of hard work into our business. But our most important asset is our reputation” Mrs. Huyong says. Lately, her investment appears to be paying off in other ways as well. Due to her family’s standing in the community, their landlord allowed them to construct a low-cost apartment complex on their rented land. Their apartments now house 12 students from different schools in the city. The couple hopes to eventually own the lot, using profits from their store and income from their apartment rentals.

Mrs. Huyong is just one of the more than 90,000 clients whose businesses have been helped by having access to MABS-designed microfinance products. The MABS Program works with rural banks to develop microloan and microdeposit products that are suited to the needs of small entrepreneurs.