“Obviously, we are not all that altruistic. It’s just that you want to feel that you are doing something that makes a difference.” – how Sarah used her experiences gained in South America to help after 9/11 and why helping in China is a real challenge.

Sarah Sable, Microfinance Consultant, PlaNet Finance, Beijing, P. R. China

If you are extremely poor and have nothing as a security, no bank is going to invest in you so that you could make something out of nothing. What seems impossible, how-ever, is possible with the help of minimal loans, called micro-finance. There are many people in the world that are caught in this trap. Alone in China 60% of the country’s 1.2 billion people live in rural areas, and over three-fourth of these farmers has no access to formal financial services. 100 million Chinese live with less than 1$ a day. 20 million urban workers who have been laid off from state-owned enterprises in recent years could start a new business if they had some working capital. These are but a few figures concerning the huge challenges of China within the next few years where PlaNet Finance hopes to help supporting the Chinese micro-finance sec-tor with its international knowledge and experiences.
Since her teenager years, Sarah Sable has worked as volunteer and as employee in a variety of social initiatives and became specialized in the field of micro-financing during the course of her young career. She joined the Chinese PlaNet Finance team to share her knowledge. She is a strong believer in the power of pro-viding the poorest with small capital amounts to help them build their own livelihoods.
Sarah is one of these people who you just want to listen and talk to; an active, smart, young person with the will and skills to make the world a little better. In the follo-wing lines you can get a first glimpse not only of Sarah’s experiences in China, but also about her work in South America and for the street vendors in New York shortly after 9/11. You may be able to read more about Sarah’s fantastic activities and her reflections in our book “MyImpact”.

Sarah Sable’s selected quotations:
“In my first project in China I was working on local micro-finance projects. It is the personal relations to people I met there, that keep me going in difficult moments. Peo-ple in the villages there really believe that the world is going to be better for their children. And they are com-mitted to helping make things better.”

“I was raised with the notion that coming from a privi-leged background you need to take responsibility and also give back.”

“The existence and work place of street vendors in New York after 9/11 was completely destroyed and the safety net for these unofficial businesses not sufficient. For me the work with them was most rewarding. I know, there were just a few of them, but I feel that for these people I made a real difference.”

“Material things, stuff that can be purchased have never been attractive enough to me.”

“I know that it is possible to have a family and raise children on moderate income. There are so many things around us that we do not need, that this is not really a sacrifice.”

“Obviously, we are not all that altruistic. It’s just that you want to feel that you are doing something that makes a difference. In a way it’s about your ego. It’s about finding the niches in which ones specific skills and experiences can fill a gap that may never had been filled, otherwise.”

“I was definitely contemplating working in the private sector. It’s not only the NGOs that can make a positive impact in the world.”

“Sometimes I am asking myself: “What am I doing here in this strange country far away from home? The main moti-vation for me is the people I encounter; people whose names and sorrows I know, whom I have a personal con-nection with.”

“Some people are made for big, world changing projects. Others help on a smaller scale. They have there “Rodrigo” and want to be able to say: “I really made a difference in this guy’s life. You need people taking care on a large scale as well as on a small scale.”

“I don’t do well in jobs where I don’t really care deep in-side about what I’m doing.”

“China is easy to criticize. But it’s important to see that its government cares about making peoples’ lives better much more than in many other countries that claim to be democracies.”

“I don’t think that I’m going to stay in China in the long term. I am American and there are some really vulnerable sectors in my own country.”

Some background on Sarah Sable:
Sarah grew up in Boston and graduated from Barnard Col-lege, Columbia University in New York with a BA in Economic History in May 2000. Her mother was a teacher and her father a legal advisor to poor peo-ple. Both were active in the Peace Corps.
At the age of 16, Sarah volunteered for the first time in a project of “Ami-gos de las Americas” in Ecuador pro-moting public health projects within rural communities. As a field supervisor and then as an assistant project director Sarah volunteered another three times for the organization in Costa Rica, Hon-duras and Mexico, bringing American high school and college students to work in the area of public health programs.
Sarah also spent a year at the “Universidad Nacional Auto-noma de Mexico” in Mexico City, and authored a thesis on poverty alleviation, in which rural finance was an important topic.
Sarah started working for the NGO “Accion NY” in New York City in 2000 as a loan officer, managing a portfolio of over one million US$ to more than 200 minority and women-owned businesses and later as project manager of the “American Dream Fund”. There she managed a US$ 3.2 million disaster assistance loan program for micro-busines-ses directly impacted by September 11th and designed a program which provided US$ 750,000 in loans and grants to street vendors who did not qualify for government assis-tance.
In Sep. 2003 Sarah moved to the China Agricultural Univer-sity in Beijing as a Henry Luce Scholar to conduct a needs assessment and program evaluation of “”The Ningxia Center for the Environment and Poverty Alleviation”, a Chinese microfinance NGO based in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region.
Today she is continuing her work in Ningxia province as microfinance consultant for PlaNet Finance in Beijing, wor-king closely with the Ningxia Center for Environment and Poverty Alleviation.

Some background on PlaNet Finance:
The one and only aim of PlanNet Finance is to fight against poverty. Its field of action is microfinance.
PlaNet Finance is an international non-profit organization supporting sustainable social and economic development by promoting the growth of a sound microfinance sector with 150 employees around the world. Active in Paris since 1998, PlaNet Finance has affiliate offices in places such as London, New York, Brussels, Milan, Madrid, Dubai as well as country programs in Mexico, Brazil, Morocco, Senegal, Benin, India and China. PlaNet Finance offers a range of services to the microfinance sector in the following five areas: Regulatory Consulting, Training and Technical Support, Information Technology, Rating, and Financing.
The registered representative office of PlaNet Finance in Beijing works for sustainable social and economic develop-ment in China by supporting and promoting the microfi-nance sector, which is still quite weak. Working closely with government and international agencies, local microfi-nance programs, NGOs, research partners, and the pri-vate sector, PlaNet Finance China hopes to contribute to a stronger inclusive financial sector.

Some background on the Ningxia Center for the Environment and Poverty Alleviation:
The Ningxia Center for the Environment and Poverty Alle-viation in the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region is the lar-gest independent Chinese NGO in Ningxia. It is based in China’s arid northwest, where overgrazing and poor crop-ping techniques are quickly turning the steppe into desert and annual income per person is less then $125 a year. Its mission is to support rural communities to overcome the interconnected problems of gender, poverty, and the environment. Using a participatory approach, the organi-zation works with individual villages to increase their capacity to identify problems and develop solutions that work in a local context. Then the Center provides finan-cial and technical support to assist the villagers in imple-menting these projects.
The microfinance program is an excellent example of how the Center works to fulfill its mission. Extending credit to women through village lending groups enables the women to generate their own income and rely less on environ-mentally destructive sheep raising methods. These entre-preneurial activities have a clear economic benefit. Households participating in the program have seen an average increase of $75 in their annual income. The len-ding groups, organized and managed by the women them-selves, not only provide credit, but also training in agri-cultural techniques and literacy. Increased economic independence and the experience of working and learning together empower the women to make their voices heard within the family and community. Furthermore, female control over financial resources means a larger share of household income spent on the children and leads to improvements in child nutrition and school attendance rates.

If you would like to engage with the work of Sarah Sable or get to know more about Planet Finance in China please visit www.china.planetfinance.org,
Read more about microfinance in China on www.microfinancechina.net,
or, for more specific opportunities, contact joanna.stefanska@myimpact.ch or wolfgang.hafenmayer@myimpact.ch directl