Working to empower families, communities and churches through microfinance and provision of integrated holistic services. At CAFECC, we practice microfinance in a fundamentally different way than other microfinance institutions. Instead of simply offering financial services for profit, we want our presence to stimulate spiritual transformation and economic stabilization. By spiritually ministering to our clients, offering business-growing lending and savings products, and assisting the development of micro-enterprises, we hope to empower the families, communities and churches we touch. We seek not only to assist our clients, but to partner with them in advancing the kingdom of God in Northern Uganda.
In order to accomplish this mission, we focus on three pillars of service:

• Spiritual Transformation
• Microfinance
• Training

We consider our mission to address the spiritual poverty and disconnectedness from God in northern Uganda as the undergirding motive for all our services. Seeking both to bless communities with economic empowerment and point them to the Lord Jesus Christ, we focus on relationships and ministry. Our loan officers personally visit and support every CAFECC client. By sacrificing efficiency and revenue to make partnerships for real spiritual transformation, we hope to strengthen existing ministries and bolster our clients to become agents of transformation themselves. We accomplish this mission in several ways.

At CAFECC, we interweave client training with biblical principles, such as biblical work ethic, leadership, stewardship, and planning, and we practice daily devotions at the office, reading scripture, worshipping, and praying. We include clients in times of prayer, coming before God on behalf of their lives, businesses, families, and churches. Being sensitive to the fact that some of our clients are Muslim, we represent Christian values to all clients without marginalizing anyone. We understand spiritual transformation starts with small steps: building close relationships, empathizing with clients, and being living demonstrations of Jesus Christ’s character.

In order to continue making Christ central in our client relationships, once a month we assemble in a CAFECC staff-client fellowship, which includes guest teaching, worship, prayer, testimonies, and dancing. CAFECC brings its entire community together and invites the Holy Spirit to knit us closer in Jesus Christ: – clients and staff share prayer requests, praises to God, and life troubles. We look for every opportunity to bond with our clients in a reciprocal effort to seek God together.

• Scripture Union, Arua
• Arua Annual Youth Camp
• Mother’s Union, Arua
• Fellowship of Christian Unions (FOCUS Arua)
• Contribution to Churches during their fundraising events
• PEER Teens Uganda ministry

We believe that responsible lending to the materially poor empowers them in ways that conventional relief and rehabilitation efforts cannot. The savings and microcredit services we provide are a hand up, not a hand-out, that help individuals in our community become self-reliant.

Our primary focus at CAFECC is reaching as many materially poor people as possible who don’t have access to traditional banks. Our flagship product, microcredit loans, is a service that provides existing business owners with loan capital to help their business grow. We focus on giving to business-people that can demonstrably improve their income generation and grow their businesses through our loans. By helping business owners with viable ideas, our microcredit service is helping the small business economy in Arua grow, one individual at a time.

We also offer savings products that provide the long-term build-up of assets that many micro-entrepreneurs lack, due to either inadequate access to formal savings or inadequate understanding of the value of saving. We attach compulsory savings to our loan product and also provide voluntary savings that create a safe and convenient way to deposit and withdraw funds. These programs help our clients develop an understanding of the advantages of saving.

As a matter of fact, we have at least 50 clients who are not interested in the loans product, but the savings product only.

Entrepreneurs often desire more formal business training—what we call microenterprise development (MED). By bringing business and entrepreneurship training to clients that depend on their small businesses for survival, we empower them in ways that most financial institutions do not.

The group meetings and client orientations required by our microcredit service provide an ideal training ground, which we use to give clients relevant training to help them grow and plan their businesses more effectively. Using the biblical business training curriculum we have developed over time, we try to give our clients the tools to succeed. From simple bookkeeping to creating a business plan, we help our clients run more reliable businesses that are less likely to default on loan repayments and less likely to falter when market conditions change.