New Partnership Announcement: MokshaYug Access
Partnership will help MYA to reach 1,000,000 of India’s working poor by 2010
October 10, 2007—Unitus, Inc., a worldwide leader in scaling innovative solutions to global poverty, today announced a new partnership with MokshaYug Access (MYA), a company working in northern Karnataka, India to provide “microfinance plus” services to poor families. “Microfinance plus” services include health care, clean water, education, and other critical products in addition to microcredit services. MYA shares Unitus’s vision for utilizing microfinance as a channel for delivering essential products and services to the working poor. Through the partnership, Unitus will help fuel MYA’s growth by delivering strategic business consulting, facilitating access to growth capital, providing HR systems, and introducing targeted technology applications to improve the organization’s capacity and operational efficiency. MYA aims to provide life-changing financial, retail, healthcare, and livelihood services to more than 1,000,000 micro-entrepreneurs and their families in three years (up from 24,000 clients today). More information about MYA can be found atwww.moksha-yug.in.
MYA, which launched operations in April 2006, currently provides savings and insurance services, as well as loans to more than 24,000 poor clients in rural areas of Karnataka. In addition to life and health insurance, MYA offers livestock and goat insurance to marginalized farmers, helping ensure they don’t lose critical income should an animal become ill. MYA has also generated additional economic opportunity for local entrepreneurs, most recently working with India’s leading incense maker to aggregate and supply raw materials at lower rates – increasing its clients’ profits by 60 percent. Additionally, MYA is building a comprehensive supply chain model and will franchise this throughout India to provide rural households with additional products and services.
Harsha Moily, Founder and CEO, is the type of visionary, entrepreneurial and commercially-minded CEO Unitus seeks to partner with. An alumni of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, Harsha has experience working in venture capital and investment banking in the US and UK, and with Reliance in India. “The microfinance expertise of Unitus and their ability to integrate it into innovative business models will help MYA develop a supply chain model which leverages microfinance to vastly improve the livelihoods of India’s rural poor. MYA is delighted to be a Unitus partner,” said Moily.
Unitus CEO Geoff Davis expressed similar excitement about the potential of this new partnership. “This is an important partnership for Unitus,” said Davis. “MYA is tackling the industry problem of innovation in a big way- it is offering poor families additional financial and finance-linked services to meet their household needs. Ultimately, this means new economic opportunities for families in rural areas. Unitus is proud to be fighting global poverty by supporting visionary leaders like Harsha Moily in their quest to scale up quickly and serve more of the world’s poor.”