The Strømme Foundation (Norwegian : Strømmestiftelsen) is a Norwegian volunteer development organization that was established on September 21, 1976. [1] [2] The foundation provides assistance to poor people in the Global South to pull themselves out of poverty through microfinancing. [2] [3] The vision of the Strømme Foundation is a world without poverty. [4] Its head office is in Kristiansand. [5]
The Strømme Foundation conducts long-term development work with local partner organizations in the Global South. By giving people, among other things, knowledge and skills, access to small loans, and saving opportunities, the foundation helps make it possible for poor people to improve and build their lives so that they can get by without charitable assistance.
The foundation is active in 12 countries, where it carries out various development projects in education and microfinancing. The organization emphasizes self-help and utilizes local partners. Its head office is in Kristiansand, Norway. The foundation has three regional offices: in Kampala, Uganda; Bamako, Mali; and Colombo, Sri Lanka. [5]
The foundation is named after Olav Kristian Strømme, a priest and chaplain at Oddernes Church, who carried out extensive fundraising work. The foundation confers the Help for Self-Help Award (Hjelp til selvhjelp-prisen). The award was given to Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus in 1997. Proceeds from Operation Day's Work in 2008 went to the Strømme Foundation's Shonglap project for young people in Bangladesh. The Strømme Foundation has its own student exchange program called Act Now at Hald International Center, which the organization carries out together with the Norwegian Missionary Society and the Norwegian Christian Student and School Association. [6]
RE:ACT is the Strømme Foundation's youth organization. It was established in October 2009 by former students at Hald International Center. [7]
Microcredit is the extension of very small loans (microloans) to impoverished borrowers who typically lack collateral, steady employment, and a verifiable credit history. It is designed to support entrepreneurship and alleviate poverty. Many recipients are illiterate, and therefore unable to complete paperwork required to get conventional loans. As of 2009 an estimated 74 million people held microloans that totaled nearly US$40 billion. Grameen Bank reports that repayment success rates are between 95 and 98 percent. The first economist who had invented the idea of micro loans was The Very Reverend Jonathan Swift in the 1720’s. Microcredit is part of microfinance, which provides a wider range of financial services, especially savings accounts, to the poor. Modern microcredit is generally considered to have originated with the Grameen Bank founded in Bangladesh in 1983 by their current Chief Adviser Muhammad Yunus. Many traditional banks subsequently introduced microcredit despite initial misgivings. The United Nations declared 2005 the International Year of Microcredit. As of 2012, microcredit is widely used in developing countries and is presented as having "enormous potential as a tool for poverty alleviation." Microcredit is a tool that can possibly be helpful to reduce feminization of poverty in developing countries.
Kristiansand is a city and municipality in Agder county, Norway. The city is the fifth-largest and the municipality is the sixth-largest in Norway, with a population of around 116,000 as of January 2020, following the incorporation of the municipalities of Søgne and Songdalen into the greater Kristiansand municipality. In addition to the city itself, Statistics Norway count four other densely populated areas in the municipality: Skålevik in Flekkerøy with a population of 3,526 in the Vågsbygd borough, Strai with a population of 1,636 in the Grim borough, Justvik with a population of 1,803 in the Lund borough, and Tveit with a population of 1,396 in the Oddernes borough. Kristiansand is divided into five boroughs; -Grim, which is located northwest in Kristiansand with a population of 15,000; Kvadraturen, which is the centre and downtown Kristiansand with a population of 5,200; Lund, the second largest borough; Søgne, with a population of around 12,000 and incorporated into the municipality of Kristiansand as of January 2020; Oddernes, a borough located in the west; and Vågsbygd, the largest borough with a population of 36,000, located in the southwest.
Microfinance consists of financial services targeting individuals and small businesses who lack access to conventional banking and related services. Microfinance includes microcredit, the provision of small loans to poor clients; savings and checking accounts; microinsurance; and payment systems, among other services. Microfinance services are designed to reach excluded customers, usually poorer population segments, possibly socially marginalized, or geographically more isolated, and to help them become self-sufficient. ID Ghana is an example of a microfinance institution.
Thomas Winfried Menko Pogge is a German philosopher and is the Director of the Global Justice Program and Leitner Professor of Philosophy and International Affairs at Yale University, United States. In addition to his Yale appointment, he is the Research Director of the Centre for the Study of the Mind in Nature at the University of Oslo, Norway, a Professorial Research Fellow at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University, Australia, and Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Central Lancashire's Centre for Professional Ethics, England. Pogge is also an editor for social and political philosophy for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Development aid is a type of aid given by governments and other agencies to support the economic, environmental, social, and political development of developing countries. It is distinguished from humanitarian aid by aiming at a sustained improvement in the conditions in a developing country, rather than short-term relief. The overarching term is foreign aid. The amount of foreign aid is measured though official development assistance (ODA). This is a category used by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to measure foreign aid.
BRAC is an international development organisation based in Bangladesh. In order to receive foreign donations, BRAC was subsequently registered under the NGO Affairs Bureau of the Government of Bangladesh. BRAC is the largest non-governmental development Organisation in the world, in terms of the number of employees as of September 2016. Established by Sir Fazle Hasan Abed in 1972 after the independence of Bangladesh, BRAC is present in all 64 districts of Bangladesh as well as 16 other countries in Asia, Africa, and the Americas.
Opportunity International is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization chartered in the United States. Through a network of 47 program and support partners, Opportunity International provides small business loans, savings, insurance and training to more than 14 million people in the developing world. It has clients in more than 20 countries and works with fundraising partners in the United States, Australia, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, Singapore, Hong Kong and the United Kingdom. Opportunity International has 501(c)(3) status as a tax-exempt charitable organization in the United States under the US Internal Revenue Code.
ACDI/VOCA is an international development nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., United States, that fosters broad-based economic growth, increased living standards, and community development. Incorporated in 1965, ACDI/VOCA's mission is to promote economic opportunities for cooperatives, enterprises and communities through the innovative application of sound business practice. ACDI/VOCA has worked in 148 countries since 1963. Total revenues for ACDI/VOCA and its affiliates are approximately $154 million. ACDI/VOCA employs approximately 1,270 people in the US and overseas.
Kiva Microfunds is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. Kiva's mission is "to expand financial access to help underserved communities thrive."
Mass media in Norway outlines the current state of the press, television, radio, film and cinema, and social media in Norway.
The Global Charity Project (GCP) is a student-run organization at Marymount University dedicated to raising funds for international and domestic sustainable development projects.
China Foundation for Poverty Alleviation (CFPA) is a nongovernmental charitable organization in Beijing, China, registered under the Chinese Ministry of Civil Affairs in 1989 and professionally supervised by the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development.
Deutsche Welthungerhilfe e. V. – or Welthungerhilfe for short – is a German non-denominational and politically independent non-profit and non-governmental aid agency working in the fields of development cooperation and humanitarian assistance. Since its founding in 1962, it has used 4.2 billion euros to carry out more than 10.369 projects in 70 countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia.[1] Welthungerhilfe holds the Seal of Approval awarded by Deutsches Zentralinstitut für Soziale Fragen (DZI). In 2014, Welthungerhilfe and the aid organization World Vision International were announced the most transparent German organizations.
ARC-Aid and Arc-Kenya are two community development organisations whose main area of operation is Nyanza, Kenya. Arc-Aid is based in Norway and mainly handles administrative work and fundraising for the projects run in Kenya it also has a hand in logistical work and project creation for various initiatives put into place. Arc-Kenya is based in Kenya and has most of the responsibility for project implementation. It runs most of its activities from its offices in the ARO Development Centre.
The Rajiv Gandhi Mahila Vikas Pari Yojana (RGMVP) is the flagship program of Rajiv Gandhi Charitable Trust, a registered non-profit institution, working for poverty reduction, women empowerment, and rural development in Uttar Pradesh, India, since 2002. RGMVP believes that "the poor have a strong desire and innate ability to overcome poverty." It aims to organize poor rural women into community institutions and promotes financial inclusion, health care, livelihood enhancement, education, and the environment.
Durga Ghimire is a social worker and president of ABC Nepal, a non-profit organization working in the field of women welfare and anti trafficking.
The Auroville Village Action Group (AVAG) is a non-governmental organization based in Irumbai which is situated close to Auroville in the Villupuram district, located in Tamil Nadu, India. It is committed to grass roots community building together with the local villages in the Villupuram district on different development areas, namely community development, economic development, capacity building, and psychosocial support. In all those four areas, the ultimate goal is to "realize the inherent capability of human beings for self-empowerment [and to] provide the proper resources to build a healthy life".
Olav Kristian Strømme was a Norwegian Lutheran priest. He also established himself as a local historian and genealogical researcher, but he is best known for his fundraising activity for many aid projects. Through announcements in newspapers, he encouraged people to donate money to projects that had been started by Norwegian missionaries, and the sums that he collected through the ads gave him the reputation of an entire aid organization in one individual.
Hald International Center is a vocational school offering courses in cross-cultural understanding and international work. The school is owned by the Strømme Foundation, the Norwegian Missionary Society, and the Norwegian Christian Student and School Association, which each have their own exchange program. The academic program is a mix of theory and practice in which all of the students spend six to seven months of student traineeship in another culture. The school has about 40 Norwegian students and 20 students from abroad. The Norwegian students have their traineeship abroad, and the students from abroad have their traineeship in Norway. Those studying at Hald International Center are eligible for full loans and grants from the Norwegian State Educational Loan Fund. The school is located at the Hald Hotel just outside Mandal.
Disability in Kenya "results from the interaction between individuals with a health condition with personal and environmental factors including negative attitudes, inaccessible transport and public buildings, and limited social support. A person's environment has a huge effect on the experience and extent of disability." Having a disability can limit a citizen's access to basic resources, basic human rights, and social, political and economic participation in Kenyan society. There are three forms of limitation of access linked to disability: impairment, disability, and handicap. An impairment is "the loss or abnormality of psychological, physiological or anatomical structure or function." A disability results from an impairment as "the restriction or lack of ability to perform an activity in the manner considered normal for a human being", and the requirement for accommodation. Finally, a handicap "results from a disability, and limits or prevents the fulfilment of a role that is normal for that individual."