India's first non-profit peer to peer microlending site, RangDe.Org has launched an ambitious pilot project called Rang De Education to fund the school fees of 200 children in Hyderabad. The Rang De Education is a unique program that has been designed to address different educational needs of low income groups. The current initiative aims to fund the financial requirement at beginning of the academic year. Rang De is partnering with Roshan Vikas in Hyderabad for this project.

According to Smita Ram, Co-founder & COO, RangDe.Org,”We have spent a considerable amount of time to develop a model to ensure proper utilization of educational loan. We have decided that parents would inform us about the loan amount for school fees. Instead of giving money to the parents, we would provide them with education vouchers. The vouchers would then be presented at the school to gain admission for the child at the school. We also managed to get a two month credit period from the schools as we would need time to raise funds for all the borrowers.”

Rang De’s field partner Roshan Vikas has taken adequate care to check the credentials of the borrowers as well as their children. Only children who have done well in their previous academic year will be considered for this loan. Since education is not an income generation activity, the social investor will not get an interest on their investment. However, the principal will be returned during the loan tenure. Roshan Vikas would get 4% flat p.a. towards their operational cost and Rang De would charge 1% flat p.a. to cover its transaction costs. Borrowers of Rang De education loans pay nothing more than 5% flat p.a.

Rang De is an initiative to provide low cost capital to a consumer of microcredit by enabling individuals to lend small sums of money via its online portal www.rangde.org. One can become a social investor on RangDe.Org by investing Rs. 500. A Rang De Social Investor will get back this money at the end of the loan tenure and earn a return of 3.5% APY (2% flat p.a.) in addition to the social return of having made a sustainable difference.

RangDe.Org has been operational for 18 months now and through its peer to peer lending platform it has benefited more than a 1000 micro-entrepreneurs in 8 Indian states namely - Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Karanataka, Kerala, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

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For further information, please contact:
Prerna Arun
Pi Communications
[email protected]