In a rural farming community outside of Cuenca, Ecuador, a widowed mother of four named María Nieves has built a thriving business raising and selling pigs and cuys (guinea pigs, an Ecuadorian delicacy).

Maria cites a microfinance organization named Fundación Espoir as a critical factor in her success—but not just because it has given her access to small loans to fund her business. Espoir has also provided her with low-cost health care and preventive health education, which has empowered her to take better care of her and her children’s health. “My children get sick less,” she says.

Espoir is one of 30 microfinance organizations and cooperatives in Latin America funded by a Seattle-based social investor named Global Partnerships (GP). Over the past six years, GP has created four social investment funds that provide affordable loans to organizations like Espoir that it believes are making an exceptional difference in the lives of impoverished people.

Typically, the organizations that make up GP’s portfolio are small but growing enterprises that provide a holistic package of microcredit and other services designed to help their clients succeed over the long haul. Many of GP’s partners did not start off by developing a microfinance program and then adding a few non-financial services; rather, they were organized to address social problems, and gradually developed credit products as just one of an array of solutions to these problems.

GP’s strategy has evolved significantly since 1994, when it was founded to support microfinance work in Central America. Recognizing that impoverished people face multiple challenges beyond access to credit, Global Partnerships now prioritizes partners that provide a holistic package of not just loans but other essential goods and services such as business education, technical support for farmers, improved access to markets and basic health services. GP believes these approaches are more likely than credit alone to help people earn a living and improve their lives.

For example, COMIXMUL, a cooperative and GP partner in Honduras, serves more than 12,000 women with microcredit integrated with a robust training curriculum. The curriculum starts with the basics of household finance and ends with certifications in specific job skills such as baking and jewelry-making. Crediflorida, a GP partner and coffee cooperative in central Peru, provides rural small-scale coffee farmers with training alongside low-cost credit and specialized loans to help members increase their productivity and income.

Since 2005, GP has increased its fund capital at work in its partners from less than $1 million to more than $36 million. Nearly eighty percent of capital loaned by its most recent fund—a $25 million fund closed in 2010-is to partners who provide integrated non-financial services to clients.While GP is proud of its progress, it is mindful of how much work is yet to be done and is always seeking to encourage its partners’ most effective work. For example, this past year, through an innovative partnership with a fair-trade coffee importer named Sustainable Harvest, GP was able to offer more flexible loan terms to coffee cooperatives, an under-served niche that typically has a difficult time accessing credit.

Based on its early success in helping develop a financially sustainable model for delivering health education and low-cost health services to microfinance clients in Nicaragua, Global Partnerships is planning to expand this work. At the same time, it is exploring how to strengthen models for helping rural farmers increase their income, and for expanding access to green technology like solar panels that benefits the environment and people in poverty.

Through initiatives like these, GP believes that microfinance institutions and cooperatives can play an even greater role in addressing global poverty.

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