Unlocking the potential of the world’s poor

BPN sponsors this carpenter and his firm in Kyrgyzstan

Loans and coaching to small businesses in the developing world are helping them grow and create jobs, Swiss entrepreneur Jürg Opprecht tells swissinfo.

Opprecht is founder and president of a Bern-based non-profit foundation, Business Professional Network (BPN), which is trying to help such enterprises forge a better future by trying to reduce poverty.

Founded in the late 1998, BPN started its mission in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. It has since grown to include projects in the African state of Benin and Nicaragua in Central America.

Opprecht, who has a real estate company and is owner of the five-star Lenkerhof hotel in the Bernese Oberland resort of Lenk, says the idea for BPN came from a visit to Kyrgyzstan. During a workshop he led, people did not ask him to give money but for help in building up their businesses.

During his trip, he found that six out of ten people were unemployed and he saw the poverty, suffering and hopelessness felt by many skilled workers and potential entrepreneurs who had no resources to support themselves and their families.

Over the past ten years, BPN has built up a reputation for its work, which has been recognised by the Geneva-based World Economic Forum.

swissinfo: Why did you start BPN? What made you want to give some of your money to help others?

Jürg Opprecht: I started BPN because I am an entrepreneur and I wanted to do something in which I could use my entrepreneurial skills and where I could help others. Even before I started BPN, I invested in small and medium-sized businesses in Switzerland and I was what you might call their business angel.

I like the idea of building a relationship with someone – not just being a cold investor – but a coach, a teacher, someone who gives advice and acts as a sparring partner to discuss expansion of the business. Then when I saw an opportunity to do that in a developing country on a larger scale, that fascinated me. Another reason why I did it was because as a Christian I feel I have a responsibility to help others if I have the opportunity.

swissinfo: What do you think has been achieved since 1998?

J.O.: It is important for me to see flourishing entrepreneurs and I am happy most about those who beyond the influence of BPN have since developed and not stagnated. That is the best reward.

swissinfo: What are the challenges of your organisation?

J.O.: The biggest challenge in all three countries is to change a way of thinking in their mindset. It’s not just teaching marketing or financial planning. They are as clever as we are; they learn quickly.

But in Benin, for example, they speak about a spirit of poverty. The Benin person always says: “We have always been poor; we are poor and will be poor in the future. There is no hope.” They have sort of resigned and we try to create hope, to help them develop their thinking and say that it can be different.

swissinfo: Who gives and how do you go about finding people who will give money to the Third World?

J.O.: The big majority are entrepreneurs, owners of small and medium-sized businesses because they know the challenge of building up a business. And the way we find them is through word of mouth and promoting BPN through events at which we call on people to support us and be our ambassadors by spreading the word.

swissinfo: How do you go about selecting people you want to support? Isn’t that rather complicated?

J.O.: That is one of the most important points in the programme. In Kyrgyzstan we have every year 300 to 350 applications just from word of mouth and from them we select about ten per cent. The most important thing we want to see is an entrepreneur, someone who has entrepreneurial skills, who has already started a business on a small scale and runs it more or less successfully. We rarely finance start-ups because this is high risk.

swissinfo: What are the ethics of Christianity that you teach?

J.O.: If you bring Christianity into a project like that, you’re often misunderstood. Some call us missionaries (laughs). I have to address this question on two levels. One is my personal motivation and that is based on my convictions as a Christian to help the poor in a sustainable way.

The other is that we teach what you might call Calvinistic ethics about work like honesty, working hard, being a good boss to your employees, being righteous and so on. And it is received extremely well because all three countries in which we work in are very corrupt. They are very grateful for ethical guidelines on how to do business.

swissinfo: What do you see as the potential for BPN?

J.O.: I see a huge potential. There are about 50 countries in the world in which a majority of the population live below the poverty line, so you could say there are a lot of opportunities and of course we got a lot of requests from other countries.

We believe we have a working proven concept of how to address the issues, which every time has to be adapted to the local culture, but the principles always remain the same.

swissinfo: What do you think about classical development aid?

J.O.: Of course there is a time and place when you have to help the poor directly. Where there is a tsunami you cannot start by creating jobs. You have to help cover needs but then you shouldn’t miss the point of putting responsibility back in local hands. If you provide help on a continuous basis, you create dependence and people get used to being dependent and this then starts an endless circle.

I’ve nothing against sponsoring children, for example; but think it through. If children get medical help and if they can get schooling, that is wonderful… but what [happens] then? That does not create wealth in a country. What people need are jobs and I think that all [development] efforts whether our way or any other should focus on making people independent and that can only be done if they can generate their own income.

swissinfo-interview: Robert Brookes

Business Professional Network

At the end of 2008, BPN was sponsoring 425 enterprises:
302 in Kyrgyzstan, 78 in Benin and 45 in Nicaragua.

This included 6,200 workers in Kyrgyzstan, 730 in Benin and 750 in Nicaragua.

This means that about 38,000 family members were being supported by BPN’s work.