Program areas at Opportunity International
Opportunity International, Inc., (Opportunity), is a tax exempt, publicly supported faith-based corporation. By providing financial services, support and training, we empower people living in poverty in developing countries to build sustainable incomes, educate their children and escape generational poverty, in the process transforming their lives, their children's futures, and their communities. Opportunity's programs are financed through charitable donations, earned income from its banking operations and focused on deploying local funds and financial services, provided by partner banks and other financial institutions to its clients. In fy2022, Opportunity and our 105 partner financial institutions released more than $2.7 billion to help 18.7 million low income clients to build and improve small businesses and local schools.
Opportunity implements its programs through a worldwide network of staff, branches, subsidiary banks and local nongovernmental organizations, as well as local implementing partners- commercial and nonprofit and microfinance institutions. Opportunity's programs are designed to maximize the local partner disbursement of loans, provision of savings accounts, remittance and others services to its clients, alongside the training and support provided by Opportunity to them. Opportunity's objective is to increase empowerment, entrepreneurship and employability amongst bottom-of-the-pyramid households, as evidenced by an increase in regular income and quality of life standards. Opportunity uses its charitable donations to invest equity, fund its direct operations, especially its education finance, agricultural finance, digital financial services and support its implementing partners. Its operating model results in the disbursed value of loans each year valuing on average 10 times the total charitable donations received. In fy2022, Opportunity's education finance programs reached over 1.6 million children in 5,663 schools, and they released more than $99.5 million in capital. Agriculture finance programs reached over 150,000 households and released over $50 million in capital.
Opportunity implements its programs in 30 countries through a worldwide network of staff, branches, subsidiary banks and local nongovernmental organizations, as well as local implementing partners commercial and nonprofit and microfinance institutions. Opportunity provides grants and maintains a minority equity interest in a number of key implementing partners to ensure a long-term alignment of interest in serving the poor. Additionally, such investments enable Opportunity to leverage local investor funds and debt to increase services and maximize the funds deployed to serve the economic needs of the poor. In fy2022 Opportunity and its partner organizations served 18.7 million clients of which 97% of clients are women. Read our 2022 impact report at opportunity.org/2022-impact.