Ethical Financing – an Interesting Topic for the GTL Project
A conference on ethical financing was organised by the Institute for Development, Employment and Training of the City Council of Cadiz (IFEF) and the Chair of Entrepreneurship of the University of Cadiz (UCA) in which attendees were offered examples of alternative credit institutions to traditional banking, which above all serve people and companies excluded from the financial system.
On this occasion, the aim was to develop and advise participants on the different forms of financing that exist and how they can benefit from them for their entrepreneurial projects. This is specially useful for the GTL project that supports entrepreneurs who want to develop initiatives in the field of green and blue economy and obtaining initial funding has been identified as a difficulty.
This has been the motivation for this meeting: to turn to other alternative sources of financing that do not focus so much on economic guarantees as on social ones and that take into account, precisely, projects of people who are in financial exclusion, who for various reasons (social issues, gender, disability, etc.) do not manage to get a loan.
To this end, two round tables were held. Javier Moreno, from FonRedess; Isaac Sánchez Jiménez, from Oikocredit and Esperanza Álvarez, from the Migranodearena Foundation, participated in this first round table to explain these financing possibilities, with Juan Manuel Alcedo, manager of the IFEF, as moderator. They all insisted that their organisations seek to alleviate financial exclusion and help groups that do not have economic guarantees, but do have social guarantees, “which generate very strong bonds of trust”.
At the second round table, three other examples of alternative financing were presented: Coop57, represented by José Manuel Betanzos; FIARE, with Vicente González and My Winning App, with Javier Solano. Moderated by Tania Lara, they presented the different alternatives for an entrepreneur to gain access to financing, without having to meet the sometimes strict criteria of traditional banking.
