With a history of pioneering Fairtrade and helping people to trade their way out of poverty, we’re leading the way once again, working with the charity CARE International UK to support lendwithcare.org.
lendwithcare.org is an innovative scheme which allows people in the UK to lend small sums of money directly to entrepreneurs 
in the developing world to help them grow their businesses.
Amy and Lucy Smith work part time at The Co-operative Food store in Yateley, Hampshire. The 21-year-old identical twins decided to lend to Esmeralda Nadela – an entrepreneur based in the Philippines wanting to establish a general store in her local community.
Amy and Lucy said: “We found out about lendwithcare.org through the membership team and thought it was a great way of helping people earn a sustainable living instead of a one-off donation. When we went online we were amazed to see farmers, shop keepers, tailors all wanting to transform their lives through working and running a business not through receiving hand outs.
“There were many worthy entrepreneurs to support on lendwithcare.org but we chose Esmeralda as she wanted to open a general store to benefit the community in a very rural area, and as we work for The Co-operative Food this really connected with us. It’s really important to provide for the local community; that’s what we do in Yateley and that’s what Esmeralda wants to do in the Philippines. We loaned Esmeralda £30. She was almost fully funded and we wanted to loan her the money so she could get on with running her store. What’s great about the scheme is that once the loan is repaid we can recycle it into another loan for another entrepreneur”.