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Our fiscal year comes to a close on June 30. To mark the end of a great year, we are re-posting some of 2012-2013's most popular blog posts. If you missed these essays, stories and interviews the first time around, here's your chance to read them. Please consider sharing your favorites with a friend via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. Thank you for supporting Five Talents! You can help us raise $100,000 in June by making a donation today.

Last year, we reported on the initial stages of our work in Myanmar, where we are partnering with the Mothers' Union and the local church to organize business training seminars for community members and micro-entrepreneurs.

Local community and church leaders have been trained to present the Five Talents business development curriculum to groups in and around Yangon, Mandalay and other locales.

Some who take part in the training sessions have already launched a micro-enterprise and are looking for ways to make their business more successful. Stan Kriz, who helped to develop the curriculum, told the story of a woman who was selling bean porridge.

"Having heard our marketing session last year, she decided that in order to expand her business she needed to get more customers to recognize that she was doing a good thing," Stan said in an interview we posted last year. "So she started to give out free samples -- I assume during the day, and I assume with the slogan, something to the effect of, 'If you were my customer, you could have had this for breakfast'. ...She had never been clued in that that's something she needed to do."

However, some of the people who attend the business training seminars have only just begun to think about micro-enterprise as a viable way to provide for their family. At the most recent seminars in November, participants took part in sessions on accounting, marketing, entrepreneurship and developing a business plan.

As a capstone project, the "students" broke into three teams and developed a business plan. The teams zeroed in on three potential enterprises – a family-owned food mart, a clinic with cardiac equipment, and a small mushroom farm. The trainers then walked the teams through each plan, highlighting strengths and weaknesses. In the end, the mushroom business was assessed as the most likely to succeed.

We are just days away from closing out the 2012-2013 fiscal year, and I want to thank you for your support of Five Talents.

Your past donations, prayers and advocacy have already accomplished a great deal. For example, in Burundi, on the continent of Africa, Five Talents has served 13,584 women and men since 2010. There are 50,000 more people who have seen this program at work and are waiting to participate.

Burundi, you will remember, is still rebuilding after a civil war that ended in 2005. In the rural communities where we work, banks don't exist. Hope is almost as rare. Few women handle money or own so much as a chicken or a cow.

Many women in these groups are having their eyes opened to the way that God has made them. They are able to buy their own cows, chickens, and clothes for the first time in their life. This, in turn, leads them to recognize their inherent dignity and enables them to take on more prominent roles in their family.

In our Burundi program, women and men are learning how to read and write for the first time. Once the literacy and business training is completed, these folks use their new skills to begin saving and lending money as a group. Each "association" creates its own constitution and sets its own interest rates and penalty fees.

Our fiscal year comes to a close on June 30. To mark the end of a great year, we are re-posting some of 2012-2013's most popular blog posts. If you missed these essays, stories and interviews the first time around, here's your chance to read them. Please consider sharing your favorites with a friend via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. Thank you for supporting Five Talents! You can help us raise $100,000 in June by making a donation today.

One of the ways Five Talents distinguishes itself from other organizations, such as Kiva, is by offering a complete package of financial and non-financial services to micro-entrepreneurs.

 Please click here to download an infographic that depicts the cycle of services that Five Talents and its partners offer to ensure that women and men can achieve true transformation of their life and micro-enterprise.

By partnering with local organizations, Five Talents provides more than just a loan and a pat on the back. Five Talents and its partners help to facilitate sustainable transformation by setting up savings and loan groups where micro-entrepreneurs can find accountability and peer support. The women and men also receive business training and, in some cases, financial literacy education.

Our fiscal year comes to a close on June 30. To mark the end of a great year, we are re-posting some of 2012-2013's most popular blog posts. If you missed these essays, stories and interviews the first time around, here's your chance to read them. Please consider sharing your favorites with a friend via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. Thank you for supporting Five Talents! You can help us raise $100,000 in June by making a donation today.

Hop on a bus heading out of Kenya's capital, Nairobi, and you'll soon learn one reason why formal savings and lending opportunities are often hard to come by for women and men living in poor, rural villages. The further out you go, the fewer banks there are – until you get to a village like Thungururu, where there's no bank at all.

According to Martin Givachu (R), a local teacher who is chairman of the Thungururu Savings Trust Group established by Five Talents in partnership with Thika Community Development Trust (TCDT), the village was the last settlement within the region to receive a proper electricity supply.

The lack of infrastructure and development in Thungururu is due, in part, to the fact that the most profitable cash crops – like sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and flowers – are not grown here. Martin said the villagers mostly rely on subsistence farming, growing fruit and grain and rearing poultry on a small scale.

Without the savings trust group that Five Talents has helped to establish, villagers would have to travel by two matatu (minibuses) in order to make use of banking facilities.

What's more, once at the bank, the villagers would have to pay fees both to set up an account and to make a withdrawal.

''This is a big problem here," said Martin, "because in addition to the time spent traveling to Thika or Matu, it would cost 600 KES (US $7) [to set up an account] – money which villagers do not have available."

Tiny Accounts Unprofitable for Traditional Banks

Banks in Kenya – and in many countries throughout the developing world – do not like to handle small accounts, largely because of the expense of running them, write MIT Professors Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo in their book, Poor Economics.

"Deposit-taking institutions are heavily regulated, for good reason – the government is worried about fly-by-night operators running away with people's savings – but this means that managing each account requires bank employees to fill out some amount of paperwork, which can quickly become too burdensome, relative to any money that the bank can hope to make from these tiny accounts."

In the future, Five Talents hopes to upgrade the savings trust in Thungururu to a full community bank, which would offer a wider range of banking services within this marginalised rural community.

''Not only would this benefit our current 105 active members, but we could also expand our operation and serve the whole community," said Martin.

Below, you'll find a selection of photographs taken by Adam Dickens that show the beauty and the poverty of this village in rural Kenya:

The rural village of Thungururu, Kenya was the last place in its region to receive proper access to electricity.

Our fiscal year comes to a close on June 30. To mark the end of a great year, we are re-posting some of 2012-2013's most popular blog posts. If you missed these essays, stories and interviews the first time around, here's your chance to read them. Please consider sharing your favorites with a friend via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter. Thank you for supporting Five Talents! You can help us raise $100,000 in June by making a donation today.

If you were to travel with one of us on a program visit, we would inevitably take you to a local marketplace to meet a few of our micro-entrepreneurs. As we walked past market stands, we'd tick off the types of products being sold: bananas, potatoes, second-hand clothing, cups of tea.

Many micro-entrepreneurs sell products that have been purchased in bulk or grown on their own plot of land. Some, though, take an existing product – or a discarded one – and refashion it in some way in order to add value.

We've written about Reech, a micro-entrepreneur in Wau, South Sudan who takes old mosquito nets and turns them into rope.

We've shown you the children's sweaters that Marta sews in Peru.

During Program Director Suzanne Schultz Middleton's last trip to South Sudan, she met Adon (R), a woman in a Five Talents savings and loan group who was selling peanut paste at a market in Kuajok.

"In South Sudan, a lot of people are bringing goods in. That's how they add value -- just by transporting things. But this woman had cultivated some ground nuts, what we call peanuts, and she'd turned them into paste (peanut butter) and sold it," said Suzanne (L). "Through her own work she had added value."

Your advocacy and donations have empowered and equipped over 54,000 women and men in 2012-2013!

Editor's Note: This blog post, first published on May 6, has been updated to reflect new sponsorships.

On June 24, we will tee off our 2013 X-OUT Poverty Golf Classic alongside some incredibly supportive sponsors.

We want to take a moment to thank each of the companies that have so far agreed to participate. Please support these generous sponsors by giving them your business. Like our individual donors, they are helping to extend the impact of Five Talents' microsavings and microcredit programs into even more under-served communities, like this one in Burundi.

If you know of a company or organization that might be interested in joining this list of sponsors, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

These are the companies that are sponsoring or partnering with Five Talents for the 2013 X-OUT Poverty Golf Classic:

• 9th Degree Advisors
• Rosenthal Jaguar Tysons Corner
• Chick-fil-A Fairfax Circle
• Tu Carpets and Rugs
• State Farm Agent Michael Garcia
• Golfsmith Tysons Corner
• Webb Mason
• Carefree Boat Club
• Mister Kleen Maintenance Company
• Pollo Peru
• Color Wheel
• Color Wheel Gallery 65
• McMullan Structural
• Cherie Kitchell & Allan Morrison

We're always looking for creative ways to tell the Five Talents story.

Here's an animated video featuring a couple of micro-entrepreneurs who have benefited from our microcredit, microsavings and business skills training programs. The short film was put together by the folks in our London office and narrated by UK Director Tom Sanderson.

[Animation] Five Talents: Microfinance for the Marginalised from Five Talents on Vimeo.

Please share this video on Facebook and Twitter! We think it's a great way to introduce friends and followers to Five Talents!

We are delighted to announce that Five Talents will once again, in 2013-2014, be featured on the website of the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington.

This honor recognizes Five Talents as "one of the best" non-profit organizations in the DC area. You can find our current, 2012-2013 Catalogue listing here.

Now in its eleventh year, the Catalogue's mission is to connect caring citizens with worthy community causes. According to Barbara Harman, President and Editor of the Catalogue for Philanthropy: Greater Washington, "Many nonprofits continue to suffer during the slow economic recovery, and the search for support has been intensified by the loss of government (and sometimes foundation) funding. Individual donors can continue to make a real difference, keeping great organizations afloat during these challenging times."

The Catalogue has helped raise over $21 million since its inception in 2003. After celebrating it's 10th Anniversary last year, the Catalogue is poised to jump into a new decade of nonprofit support and community engagement.

From traditional, direct mail catalogues, to innovative online portals, to special events and social media, the Catalogue's goal is to build networks of engaged donors and great nonprofits that will make a difference in new ways, on their terms. It also provides charities with a stamp of approval that tells donors they can invest with confidence.

We post to this blog three times a week, on average, but even regular visitors to our website are unable to catch every single article.

Below, you'll find a list of our most popular blog posts from the last month. If you've been away for a while, these program updates will get you caught up in no time.

If you're unfamiliar with Five Talents' microfinance programs, then this is a great place to start learning more about the nature of our work. As you'll soon find, every program is unique. Some are savings-led; others are credit-led. Some have a literacy and financial education component. Some target communities in urban slums. Others work in extremely rural, un-banked communities.

All of our programs are empowering women. All are helping parents to develop a sustainable micro-enterprise that can improve their quality of life and help their children to stay in school. All are bringing folks living in impoverished communities a chance to save money, take out a small loan, and learn basic business skills, like accounting and marketing. And all program participants are reminded of their God-given dignity and encouraged to use the unique gifts their creator has placed in their care.

Please check out any of these program updates you have missed, and share your favorites with folks on Facebook and Twitter: