Reshama lives with her husband and four children in a rural village in Uttar Pradesh, India. Needing to supplement the family’s income from their small farm plot and two cows, Reshama trained to become a Business Correspondent (BC) Agent. In her village of 1,000 people, she conducts financial transactions using a mobile phone with digital banking apps, providing secure financial transactions for her neighbors—many of them women—which lead to increased financial stability. Reshama’s children can attend school; she says she “grows in hope and confidence” as she works with her customers.
Dear friends,
Whenever Opportunity International supporters return from an Insight Trip, they inevitably remark on the optimism and strength of the people we serve. They meet teachers who have built accessible, quality schools for children in their community; farmers who have learned best agricultural practices to improve their harvests and increase their incomes; mothers who put our financial training in practice as entrepreneurs. They meet people living in the depths of poverty who are overcoming the barriers of finance, education, health, and environment to build brighter futures for their families.
Thanks to supporters like you and our partners around the world, this impact is exponential. Our 2023 Annual Report illustrates the progress we continue to make together. Through the following pages, you’ll see the power of your philanthropic investments and meet farmers, teachers, students, and entrepreneurs transforming their families and communities. Fighting global poverty can be overwhelming, but by focusing on one family—or one community—at a time, we are turning a bold vision into reality: a world where all people can live with dignity and purpose.
Every day, motivated by our call to serve people living in poverty, we continue to create opportunities, invest in the future, and spark lasting change. Walking in God’s footsteps as we do this hard and holy work, we lift you up in thanksgiving, and we lift up the people we serve with gratitude, grace, humility, and hope for all that is to come.
Joyfully,
Atul Tandon Chief Executive Officer
Atul visits with Maria, a Colombia Graduation participant and Opportunity entrepreneur who started her own restaurant selling soups and seasonal dishes. Now she can provide food, improved housing, and education for her children.
Cover photo and above by Achin Phulre
Gratitude For Growth
Rooted in values of stewardship and transformation, Opportunity International tirelessly strives to increase both our outreach and impact. With the client at the center of all we do, our spirit of listening, learning, and innovating has resulted in scaled outputs and measurable outcomes.
Between December 2020 and 2023, the Opportunity family supported a new strategic plan and a successful $101M Waymaker campaign. Thanks to our generous supporters and resilient clients, annual impact numbers in education, agriculture, and microenterprise increased between 2020 and 2023. Globally in 2023, we served 20 million clients and partnered with 138 financial institutions.
Education annual loans value
Education quality schools
$86.6M 2020 2023
$202.8M
EDUCATION FINANCE 2,930 250,217
Farmers
Women Clients
Clients
Clients
To learn more about the far-reaching scope of Opportunity International’s work, read our comprehensive 2023 Impact Report here
Growth through Human-centered Innovation
A high-touch, high-tech, high impact approach to agriculture finance empowers people facing poverty, gender, and age barriers to improve financial and agricultural practices. We use human-centered design—putting our real clients at the center of the product design process.
One example: In response to the needs of smallholder farmers in Malawi, we piloted an AI tool that farmers can use to answer questions they have about farming practices. The system is populated with content from the Malawi government’s agriculture manual of best practices and our training material together with a ChatGPT-like conversational interface. This innovation allows timely access to critical information—sometimes saving a farmer a 20 km-walk to find a local extension service provider—enabling learning and real-life use for smallholder farmers. Well-received by the farmers in Malawi, we plan to scale and replicate this resource in other countries.
To learn more about how AI is helping smallholder farmers, watch the 2023 Financial Inclusion Week panel of global leaders.
My home was not affected by Cyclone Freddy, but my farm was—everything was washed away. This was painful to witness, as I had hoped for a good harvest. To prepare for future cyclones, I have learned good agriculture practices; I will plant vetiver grass and more trees as well as practice intercropping and other sustainable agricultural methods to conserve the soil and water.”
— DORKA, FARMER AND SAVINGS GROUP MEMBER, MALAWI
Gratitude For Giving
How Does My Dollar Grow?
Thanks to Opportunity’s asset-light, partner-rich model, we connect our clients with our financial partners to access loan funds. For every $1 we raise and invest into a program, $10 is loaned to clients locally. The multiplier is the ratio of your donations to loans disbursed to our clients by our financial institution partners, averaged over three fiscal years—meaning more dollars are put to work in the hands of hardworking families working their way out of poverty.
Atupele supports her family by collecting firewood from the nearby mountain in her Malawian village. In her savings group, she learns financial literacy, goal setting, and has access to loans that will enable her to expand her business and make her home more safe and secure after the destruction from Cyclone Freddy.
Your gift develops the products and solutions—financing, training, and support— that our clients need.
Your investment equips our financial partners with the financial resources and expertise they need to serve our clients with loans, seed funding, and technical support.
Our local partners loan out, on average, 10 times what is donated by leveraging loans and social capital, developing a strong stewardship return on your investment.
Growing Engagement
As we grow the Opportunity family of supporters, we are grateful for the many ways people choose to help build a path out of poverty for our left out and left behind neighbors.
u Board of Governors: Supporters who contribute $5,000 or more annually earn a membership to the Governors community and serve as advocates in their own personal or professional networks. They receive regular updates on our work from senior leaders and have the chance to connect with other mission-minded people.
u Donor Trust Groups: Donor Trust Groups are comprised of five to ten families and/or individuals interested in solving some of the most challenging obstacles to tackling poverty. Donor Trust Groups choose a country or program to support and pool their charitable giving to achieve greater impact within their chosen initiative. Groups often conclude their work with an international Insight Trip to see their philanthropy in action.
u Team Opportunity: Team Opportunity invites adventure seekers to participate in extraordinary running, climbing, and hiking events worldwide. Opportunity International’s endurance challenge program connects passion with action: epic challenges that build awareness of and funds to fight global poverty.
Smriti trained and works as a Business Correspondent (BC) Agent in Bihar, India. BC Agents provide mobile digital services primarily to women who otherwise would not have access to financial services. Smriti shares, “My experience as a BC is not just limited to the money I make. It is also that they [the community] feel that I do good work and respect me.” She hopes to study further and gain more expertise, as she has found “an independence—social and financial” that she wants to maintain.
Photo credit: Achin Phulre
Gratitude For Partners
Opportunity International’s efficiency and impact are tied deeply to our partnerships. Like-minded mission partners including corporate or family foundations, social impact investors, and government entities walk alongside our clients as they make their way out of generational poverty.
Opportunity has partnered with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) for over 30 years, working together to support entrepreneurs, grow businesses, and increase access to quality education. We celebrate the power of partnerships in driving sustainable change, recognizing that ending extreme poverty requires cooperative action.
Long-term Growth Thanks to Partnerships
Last year, the UPS Foundation committed $1.2M to Opportunity’s Unstoppable Women initiative to develop digital and financial solutions designed to support women-owned micro and small businesses in India, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Colombia. With UPS’ support, Opportunity provides technical assistance and capital solutions that make capital flow to women, helping them create and sustain employment for their families and communities.
Gratitude For the People We Serve
KENYA: Thriving Learners
In 2020, Opportunity EduFinance designed a three-year study in Kenya in partnership with Zizi Afrique and the University of Chicago. The study focused on assessing the impact of the Opportunity EduFinance model on learning outcomes, disaggregating for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and gender.
After three years of child learning measurements, the study finds children gain as much as half a year equivalent of additional schooling linked to school leader and teacher professional development and school improvement loans invested in their school—critical components of our model.
The key findings not only highlighted overall learning gains by students from schools in the EduQuality program and/or borrowing a school improvement loan, but also larger learning gains by students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds and girls. This may indicate investments in professional development and loan accesses for affordable non-state schools could have a disproportionately greater impact on more marginalized learners.
GHANA: Comfort, Smallholder Farmer
Opportunity’s Agriculture Finance work continues to scale at reduced costs and increased efficiency. The proven three-pronged model of customized training, provision of financial resources, and ongoing group support enables smallholder farmers to increase their harvests and earn more income to stabilize their families. Comfort is a smallholder farmer in Ghana:
In 2021, I obtained my first loan of $130 for my farm which I successfully repaid. I took a second loan of $215 which I used for my current rice farm. Both of my farms are flourishing. Today, I find it much easier to acquire credit to purchase farm inputs like fertilizer. This accessibility to credit has made farming and engaging in business much more manageable than before. Moreover, the size of my farm has expanded, further contributing to my success and growth.”
COLOMBIA: Maria the Entrepreneur
Maria Perez Barrera runs a small grocery shop out of her home that she shares with her husband, two children, and two grandchildren in Cartagena, Colombia.
Before learning about Opportunity International, Maria and her family lived in deep poverty and struggled to meet basic needs: adequate food and shelter, education for the children, medical care. In early 2023, Maria’s family committed to the 18-month Graduation program—called Pathways to Opportunities in Colombia. Graduation aligns with our client-centric, three-pronged model of training, access to financial services, and group support; it uses the same interventions we’ve known to work over our 50+ years, applying them to people living in much more marginalized and vulnerable circumstances.
In the last 14 months, Maria has transformed her life. She increased her income and learned financial literacy, family wellbeing, job training, and business management. She feels supported by Opportunity International staff, by fellow Graduation participants, and by her neighbors in her tightknit community.
Gratitude for Servant Leaders
Opportunity International Voices Around the Globe
u Atul Tandon, CEO, 2023 Year in Review and Breaking the Cycle of Extreme Poverty
u Simona Haiduc, Managing Director of Strategic Partnerships, U.N. Sustainable Development Goals
u Tim Strong, Head of Agriculture Finance, and Mark Castellino, Senior Vice President, Government Services, Agricultural Financing
u Greg Nelson, Chief Technology Officer, Pioneering Digital Transformation
FY2023 Expense
Program spending is 84% of all expenses 16%
84% Programs
Fundraising, General, and Administrative Expenses
million
Photo credit: Achin Phulre
Consolidated Statement of Activities
Consolidated Statement of Financial Position
Opportunity’s programs are financed through charitable donations, earned income from its banking operations, and from focusing on deploying local funds and financial services provided by partner banks and other financial institutions to its clients. Opportunity implements its programs through a worldwide network of staff, branches, subsidiary banks, and local nongovernmental organizations, as well as local implementing partners—commercial, nonprofit, and microfinance institutions. Opportunity uses its charitable donations to invest equity and to fund its direct operations of Education Finance, Agriculture Finance, Digital Innovations, and supporting its implementing partners.
The Consolidated Statement of Activities includes charitable revenue and expenses, as well as the consolidated results of the commercial banks where Opportunity is the majority owner. Charitable support was lower by 11% from $33.1M to $29.5M, due to FY2023 including only one quarter of the three-year Waymaker Campaign versus a strong 2022 Waymaker Campaign year. Government revenue decreased by $1M as 2023 did not include government pandemic relief grants of 2022. Charitable yield to program increased 20.6% year over year. To increase impact, Opportunity deliberately increased spending for 2023 charitable program work which resulted in total expenses exceeding 2023 revenue. The shortfall was funded by donations from prior years. Yield to Program is 84% of total expenses.
The Consolidated Statement of Financial Position includes the charitable assets and liabilities, as well as the assets and liabilities of the majority-owned banks. Included in 2023, Other Assets is $6M of cash invested in corporate bonds and $2.3M of right of use assets, operating leases. There is a corresponding $2.4M right of use liability. The ratio of charitable assets to charitable liabilities is very strong at 6.4 as of September 30, 2023. Banking assets and liabilities remained steady even though there was 10% devaluation of Ghanaian currency year over year.
Opportunity International’s consolidated financial statements were prepared in accordance with U.S. generally accepted accounting principles and were independently audited by BAKER TILLY US, LLP. The full audit report including schedule 2, Combining Schedules of Statements of Activities-Banking Operations, may be viewed at: opportunity.org/documents
U.S. Board
Katéy Assem
Chairman, Board of Directors, Opportunity International Savings & Loans, Ghana
Susan Haigh
Former President and CEO, Twin Cities Habitat for Humanity
Joel Johnson
Former President, CEO and Chairman, Hormel Foods Corporation, Inc.
Janelle Muntz Lassonde
Former banker and independent author
Greg Nelson*
Former Vice President of Partner Ecosystem, Microsoft
Jane Nelson
Former Vice President, Bank of America
Dale Patterson, Board Vice Chair
President, The Bourton Group
Former Chair and CEO, Opportunity International Canada
Carol Pelino
Former Co-Chair, Board of Governors Opportunity International
LeAnn Pedersen Pope, Board Chair
Former Partner, Burke, Warren, MacKay & Serritella, P.C.
Fred Sasser
Chairman Emeritus, Sasser Family Holdings, Inc.
Atul Tandon
Chief Executive Officer, Opportunity International
Ken Wathome
Chairman of the Board, NW Realite Ltd., Property One Ltd., Kenya
