Samantha Rayner and Lumana Credit change lives in rural Ghana
As financial superheroes go, Samantha Rayner (BA 2009) is pretty mild-mannered. And Lumana Credit, the micro-lending organization she founded last year with Foster School classmates, goes about its life-changing work without much fanfare.
But if the scale of Rayner’s Ghanaian stimulus plan is micro, its impact is definitely macro for many hard-working rural poor in the West African nation.
It is the kind of real-world experience the Foster School’s Undergraduate Program supports – whether regional or international in scope – through programs and networks that range from formal internships to independent studies in which student-led efforts such as Lumana can take their initial shape.
Inspiration to perspiration
Inspired by microfinance innovator Muhammed Yunus, Rayner incubated Lumana during an independent study at the Foster School. She piloted the organization in Atorkor, Ghana, the summer of 2008.
Back at the Foster School, she founded the UW Social Entrepreneurship Club and assembled an A-team of volunteers, among them Foster alumni Karin Avellaneda (BA 2009), Eric Appesland (BA 2009), Avi Zellman (BA 2009), PJ LaFemina (BA 2009), and Alexandra Berg (BA 2009), as well as several current Foster students. She also entered and won seed funding from the UW Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition in 2009.
“I love that we can draw on so many diverse backgrounds and talents,” Rayner says. “There are so many ways that people have plugged into Lumana.”
Model citizenship
Lumana’s general goal is to help people lift themselves out of poverty by launching profitable small businesses. Rayner and her team train local leaders to teach entrepreneurship and basic management, then award modest loans—typically $50 to $400—to help women develop or expand their hand-woven textile mills, mobile convenience stores and meal delivery services, among other niche services to the community.
Little more than a year later, and still driven largely by volunteers, Lumana employs two loan officers and eight entrepreneurship instructors in Ghana, and has invested nearly $30,000 in 150 clients from two villages—with a 98 percent payback rate. Rayner adds that fund-raising is critical to the organization’s growth. With strong local bonds and a powerful model, she is planning to reach 500 clients in 2010 and negotiating the acquisition of a failing microcredit in a neighboring village.
Ultimately, she hopes Lumana’s lean, innovative model of investment-plus-education will become a prototype for a young industry, and testament to what inventive, fearless, passionate young people can accomplish in collaboration.
“Lumana has been built by an incredible team that is motivated by the mission,” Rayner says, “and who want to do good with their business degrees.”
About Lumana
We were founded in 2009 by a group of young people who shared a goal of building better systems to help rural Africans thrive. To this day we continue to engage young professionals from all over the world interested in taking a creative control in solving some of the toughest problems our world faces.
Together, we work to achieve our mission of helping rural Africans to reach their personal and financial goals by providing savings accounts, small loans, business management education, and relevant local mentorship to primarily women in small villages across rural Ghana.
As an organization, Lumana provides small loans, savings accounts, and business education training to entrepreneurs in rural Ghana.
is to provide financial services to rural Africans living in poverty in order to help them reach their personal and financial goals.
is that rural Africans are amazingly resourceful people who can lift themselves and their communities out of poverty if they have a partner to help get them started.
is to be that partner in the communities we work with. By creating opportunities for business education, cooperative group formation, savings account creation and microfinance loans, we are laying the foundation of financial security that rural Africans can build off of to make their communities healthier, happier and more secure.
is connecting young professionals from all over the world to hands-on opportunities in the villages we serve. There they can begin learning from our program and testing new ideas to develop the most effective ways of serving the rural poor.
Sammie implemented the pilot micro-credit program that marked the inception of Lumana in 2008, which occurred through meeting members of the Atorkor Development Foundation in Ghana. She has been the driver of Lumana’s strategic expansion ever since. Sammie is Lumana's operations director, overseeing the implementation of programs and communication between teams in Ghana and the US as well as managing the organization's finance and accounting systems. In addition to keeping the back-end in check, Sammie loves introducing new people to Lumana, maintaining relationships with supporters and encouraging young people to get involved in social entrepreneurship through Lumana's Fellows Program. Sammie has a BA from the University of Washington Foster School of Business with a focus on international business and French. Sammie began her path toward founding Lumana when looking for ways to use her business degree to do good in the world. She was struck by the powerful concept of microfinance and wanted to be a part of spreading it to rural areas in Africa where there was - and still is - a great need for funding.
Cole Hoover is co-founder of Lumana and currently works as the Director of Programs ensuring that Lumana's projects in Ghana are strategically planned while leveraging the support of team members and community supporters around the world. Cole also leads the fellowship program which connects young leaders from many different countries with hands on experiences working with our microcredit programs in Ghana. He became involved in Lumana to combine his love for people and travel with the belief that the millennial generation is strategically poised to achieve emerging goals of the twenty-first century. Cole began his career as an organizer and educator by helping to found a start up called Your Revolution which created applications for online voter registration during the 2008 election. Since then he has worked with a team building a social network for renewable energy coalitions, as a volunteer coordinator for Real Change magazine's Initiative 100 and as an outreach coordinator for several local political campaigns. Cole left the role of VP of business development for Birds Eye Media in 2010 to focus on Lumana full time. Cole currently lives in Seattle where he works for Lumana full time and enjoys all the awesome beauty the Northwest has to offer.
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