The pilot will be carried out with the Mexican branch of Heifer International, a renowned NGO, which in all this time has provided assistance to more than 70 million people in more than 125 countries.
Dear ethichubbers, what wonderful news. Not only because we can now reach more small producers with the opening of this third originator hub in Mexico, the first country where we established ourselves, back in November 2018. It is also because for the first time we are going to deploy Collective Collateral on CELO, a blockchain with which we share the same purpose and where we feel very comfortable building our solution.
But perhaps, on this occasion, the most relevant thing about this announcement that we want to share with you is "with whom" we are going hand in hand. Heifer International, founded in 1944, is focused on fighting hunger, poverty and, like us, also aims to protect the environment in rural settings. So, with these shared purposes, the conversations between the two entities have been very fluid. And for a long time. But, as you are reading right now, they have finally fructified and between both entities we have managed to materialize our good purposes. We are sure that this alliance will go far beyond this pilot and hopefully it will inspire other organizations similar to Heifer to follow this wonderful example and participate in collaborative ecosystems like ours.
We are going to carry out this pilot with Heifer's Mexican subsidiary, which has selected coffee-producing families from Anepaan O'Deput, a cooperative that brings together more than 400 small producers, located in the municipality of Angel Albino Corzo, in the state of Chiapas.
We await the first participants in the pilot with open arms and hope that together we can provide them with the financing they need!
Gustavo Maldonado, Executive Director of Heifer Mexico, tells us that "this collaboration allows us to increase the options of our projects, so that farming families can achieve the sustainability of their farms and agribusinesses, this being the beginning that will allow us to expand this benefit". And this is why we are convinced and very motivated, Gustavo. And for us, for Ethichub, as Gabriela Chang points out, the agreement with Heifer Mexico means "a first step for the scaling of the Circles of Trust in the selection of projects to finance them on our platform, and thus reach more small farmers excluded from the traditional financial system" and very important, "in addition, for the first time, we deploy, our collective collateral on CELO, an impact blockchain where we work very comfortable and where we want to add value." Deploying our collective collateral on CELO is very good news that ethichubbers who follow us on RRSS have been able to sense from the team's comments.
And little more, as we told you at the beginning, this will be the third Originator Hub in Mexico. At the end of last year, we already told you about the collaboration with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA). And veteran ethichubbers will remember the first one, the SPR "Harvesting Wealth".
And that's all, let's go for the fourth in Mexico!
EthicHub is a ReFi (Regenerative Finance) protocol that helps unbanked farmers access capital at low interest rates in a win/win model where all stakeholders benefit from the interaction. Its crowdlending platform was launched in June 2018, and to date it has brokered more than $4M in microcredits to more than 600 families in 6 countries.
