Emailing a Future


	Recipients of small-business loans from the World Relief Agency gather for their weekly meeting in the Phu Minh commune in Vietnam, 38 kilometers from Hanoi. (Photograph by Lois Raimondo)

or the price of a good meal out in most American cities, a Vietnamese or Cambodian woman can start a business that puts her family on the path to lifetime self-sufficiency. Because of a corrupt mail system and exorbitant phone costs, a global developmental-aid organization called the World Relief Agency was originally stymied in its attempt to make small-business loans available to women in these countries.

But recently, two enterprising American brothers equipped with laptop computers decided to bypass the bureaucracy and use the Internet to provide small but vital sums -- an average of U.S.$42 per loan -- to needy Vietnamese and Cambodian women.


	Tran Thi Hu feeds her poultry in the courtyard of her home. She bought them with a loan from the World Relief Agency. (Photograph by Lois Raimondo)


	The World Relief Agency's Poverty Lending Program allows this woman to run a modest beauty parlor. The average loan amount is U.S.$42. (Photograph by Lois Raimondo)

"Developing the lending program, tending to each nuance and each particular, requires constant communication," says World Relief Agency administrator Joel Copple, who supervises the program in Cambodia, while his brother, Steve, directs it in Vietnam.

Using email to keep in touch with each other and with relief administrators worldwide, as well as to coordinate loan payments in the impoverished countries, the agency had provided over $300,000 in loans to more than 8,000 women by February 8, 1996 -- the day these pictures were taken.

mailto:jampo!wrun@netnam.org.vn