About NamasteDirect

NamasteDirect is committed to alleviating poverty in rural communities of Guatemala and southern Mexico by providing impoverished women entrepreneurs with microcredit loans along with a personal business mentor, vocational training workshops and informal business education.

Conventional wisdom has it that there are four barriers to escaping poverty (defined as less than $2 a day income per household member) for 2.7 billion people worldwide. They are:
a. Lack of capital
b. Lack of education
c. Poor health conditions
d. Disasters – natural and man-made, principally wars

NamasteDirect's response is to provide hard-working, determined women with the means to lead their families out of poverty and we measure our effectiveness on a woman-by-woman basis.
 
The NamasteDirect package is, to the best of our knowledge, unprecedented in the field of microcredit. Our planned use of technology to assist the women is also unprecedented as it involves bringing the world wide web to heretofore isolated rural villages and providing the women and their families with individual web sites to access business and market information, educational materials and trans-national communications with business associates, family and friends. It will also provide the platform for the first bottom-up communication system linking women borrowers with donors from around the world.

A significant improvement in the economic conditions and quality of life of 1 woman and her family can be attained for $500. This will mean an increase in income for the woman which, in her hands, will be invested in the education, nutrition, housing and health care of her children, as well as in growing her business! These benefits will multiply over the years.

Key investors will see tangible results (ROI) via reports and visits to the projects and their comments and input into the process will be solicited. This is a unique opportunity for very high returns in social and economic change!

Our History

IN 1973, Bob Graham, a successful California businessman and CPA, visited Guatemala as part of the California Agricultural Leadership program. Struck by the plight of the poor farming families he met, he decided on the spot that someday he would try to help suffering people such as these.

A decade later in 1984, Bob founded the Katalysis Partnership, dedicated to providing a hand up (rather than a hand out) to such people in war-torn Central America. This was also the launching of Bob’s “50–50 at 50” plan: at age 50 he would begin to devote 50% of his time and 50% of his resources to service to others. Subsequently, thousands of people--mostly women--have led their families out of poverty with the helping hand of Katalysis and its supporters.

Twenty years later, Bob continues to be deeply involved with this work, volunteering his time to NamasteDirect, a successor non-profit to the Katalysis Partnership. While the original Katalysis organization has mushroomed into the Katalysis Microfinance Network of Central America (a regional non-profit of 13 intermediary credit providers serving more than 180,000 borrowers with over $60 million in loan capital in four countries), Bob and his associates are continuing to link donors to the poorest borrowers through NamasteDirect, where the motto is "Ending Poverty, One Loan at a Time!"