Welcome to Oikocredit USA, the United States arm of Oikocredit, a worldwide financial institution that promotes global justice by empowering disadvantaged people with credit. For more than 30 years, Oikocredit has proved that entrepreneurs, cooperatives and small businesses in developing countries are credit-worthy partners.

At Oikocredit, we invest in people. Our roots go back to 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a powerful speech at the World Council of Churches. In it, he called out the hypocritical practice of congregations protesting the Vietnam War while their members' pension funds benefited from investing in companies profiting from the war.

The question became, how can our investments reflect our values?

Seven years later, in 1975, Oikocredit was officially founded by the World Council of Churches. A global cooperative based in the Netherlands, Oikocredit aggregates investor money from people in the developed world and then re-distributes those investments to creditworthy microfinance institutions in the developing world.

Today Oikocredit works with partners in more than 70 countries and has grown to be the largest private financier of microcredit in the world. Although over 30,000 individuals and more than 500 institutions are currently Oikocredit investors, until recently relatively few of these investors were from the United States. Oikocredit USA was established to raise awareness among Americans of the opportunity to invest in the international cooperative.

With Oikocredit, investors can be confident that their money is directly benefiting the poorest people in the world. We use a stringent set of criteria in selecting microfinance partners and implement proven methods for measuring the social impact of microcredit. (For more on how Oikocredit leads the field in measuring social impact, visit Oikocredit's site on social performance.) Investors earn a sustainable return from Oikocredit — typically 2% — and this allows individuals to consider microfinance a viable part of their ongoing investment portfolio.

Explore our site to read up on current microfinance news or learn more about specific partners and clients that Oikocredit reaches around the globe. You can make an investment (from as little as $20) or consider other ways to engage with Oikocredit's mission to empower the global poor.

Still have questions? Visit our FAQs to learn more.