Out of Africa - interview with Peter Ryan

By Laura Holt on October 1st 2010

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We all think about charity. But for most people, it remains just that. A thought, dislocated from action – a phone call at best to absolve us from guilt at Christmas.

Peter Ryan is no such man. He started off, quite traditionally, marketing Old Spice and other toiletries in Africa and Eastern Europe, before moving on to Duracell and then selling commodity food products in the UK for a French company. He’d established a strong track record within the consumer goods sector and had success with setting up a number of businesses for other people. But it was a trip to the Philippines in 1997 to see a university friend that had a paradigm shift on his working life.

“He was making the odd loan to poor people,” Ryan explains over coffee in Chiswick. “And I thought, without having really been exposed to the world of microcredit before, I have to support him. That was where I made the decision to make a big step, initially to donate, but then to start up our own operation.”

So Ryan abandoned his former life in favour of a more meaningful, if not highly uncertain, vocation. He chose Chiswick as his base, registered the charity and began raising funds with a group of friends. Back in 2002, his idea was a revolutionary one. And still today, it’s a fairly nascent and progressive model that underpins the MicroLoan Foundation.

Working predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa, their mantra is to provide “a hand up, not a hand out.” They do this by offering small loans to groups of poor rural women in countries like Zambia and Malawi. These women have to apply for a loan as a collective in order to set up a business. They are charged interest, monitored by field workers from the MicroLoan Foundation and encouraged to establish themselves as a traditional limited company – with a chairman, a secretary and a treasurer.

“They are normally very small businesses like buying and selling rice. Or procuring a big drum of oil, dividing it up into mini sachets and selling it around the rural communities. Same with salt, beans, tomatoes and fish - they normally choose to trade in raw materials. These people are at the bottom of the pyramid, so their main preoccupation is ‘can I live tomorrow?’.”

Ryan invested £10,000 of his own capital and took up residence in Barley Mow Passage. There were no full time staff at the start, just unpaid volunteers. An accountant friend of his joined the ranks, along with a little help from the PR director of Diageo. And knowing some of Chiswick’s well-heeled residents also meant that Ryan could tap into a rich resource of potential investors. But it was by no means an easy journey. “The first two or three years were hard,” he admits. “Harder than I thought. It’s the most rewarding thing you could ever do – but it’s no walk in the park.”

As gruelling as it may sometimes have been, the hard work paid off. In under a decade, the MicroLoan Foundation has built up a robust network of hundreds of employees, with branches across several continents, serving over 800 groups of women. They distributed £3m last year in Malawi alone, can boast a 99 per cent repayment rate on loans and recently signed a £200,000 deal with Deloitte for specialist consultancy time. They also have Bob Geldof and Gaby Logan as patrons and have attracted a substantial amount of press for their pioneering microfinance model – including winning The Daily Telegraph's Charity Appeal
in 2007 and this year being nominated for The Alternative Rich List, decided by a public vote:

“Personally, I’ve felt that I couldn’t mobilise our team to muster votes, because I didn’t want to take away from the work,” says Ryan. “It would be nice to win, but I feel that if you do this kind of work, it’s inappropriate behaviour.”

If that all sounds very noble, I don’t think Ryan intends it to be. While the work he does is humanitarian in a very literal sense – ethical, compassionate, reformative – his approach is that of a keen businessman and a pragmatic tactician. Even when I question him on the worst aspect of his job, or difficult situations he’s perhaps encountered upon being in Africa, he’s hesitant.

“Well…” he says after a considered pause, “it’s…sort of…death. People dying of Aids, or malaria. We go to see groups and ask ‘who’s had malaria in the last year?’. And they will all have been affected. There are also a lot of orphans because of people dying of illnesses.”

“But,” he quickly says, unwilling to let it become yet another charity ad, “one of the great things that we do is provide an extra source of income so that these kids can be looked after in an African home, with family members, as opposed to being put into a European-funded orphanage.”
For Ryan, it seems imperative not to allow himself to become embroiled within the emotional aspects of the job. Instead his mind focuses on finding a sustainable solution – one that will empower people to take on a challenge, get training and actually extricate themselves from adverse circumstances.

“What has always struck me about the work we do,” he says methodically, “is that it’s sustainable. If you give them the equipment and the tools, they can really do something. You go into these rural communities, you make plans, you have your repayment meetings, and you’ll return to see piles of cash being counted on the floor.

They’ve really surpassed themselves, and it’s all down to their energy.” When you hear Ryan explain how the MicroLoan Foundation functions, it seems very achievable, and almost renders the traditional charity model
as antiquated. He’s a facilitator; a self-effacing enabler helping people to help themselves. While he himself might wince at corralling voters for The Alternative Rich List, few seem more deserving of the accolade.

MicroLoan Foundation, 10 Barley Mow Passage, W4 4PH, 020 8827 1688 www.microloanfoundation.org.uk

Out of Africa - interview with Peter Ryan

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