In Christmas 20011 we lent our Christmas card budget to Sam Veng, to help with her business.

Sam is a 45 year old widow with ten children between the ages of 7 and 26. She runs a general store from her home in the village of Prek Trob, in the Ek Phnom District of Battambang Province, Cambodia. Sam has run the store for 20 years, and has been a member of the Ek Phnom Credit Union for the last four years.

Sam sells canned foods, sugar, ingredients and water, but has a limited amount of working capital. She is seeking a loan to buy new stock for her store, and intends to repay the loan over 6 months.

lendwithcare.org is a joint initiative between the Co-op and CARE international. It is dedicated to helping people transform their own lives, by using microfinance. The wonderful thing about lendwithcare.org is that we can see precisely who our money is going to help. We can even track the repayments to our loan. Once the loan has been repaid we can either re-lend it (which we will undoubtedly do), or withdraw the money, so that it is returned to us.

We first read about lendwithcare.org in an article in The Guardian. The article pointed out that savings rates are so low at the moment, why not do something more worthwhile with your money?