As a young girl growing up in Marneuli, a small city in southern Georgia, Rena Ajalova found it difficult to learn foreign languages at school. She’s from a country that is home to a number of ethnic minorities, with more than six languages spoken. In her region, which is populated by a majority of Georgian Azerbaijanis and sits close to the Azerbaijani and Armenian borders, the former is the predominant language – and there was little scope to learn Georgian to a high standard, let alone English.
Rena, 24, and her sister Gulijan, 22, wanted to make it easier for people from ethnic minorities and rural communities to learn these languages and communicate with one another. They came up with the idea for Lingua, a language centre based in their home town. Officially opened in February 2017, Lingua now has 40 students enrolled – ranging in age from 13 to 21. “I wanted to help minority communities learn languages and integrate with others through our courses,” says Rena.
“There wasn’t such a centre where young people could meet each other and share ideas. This is the first centre for youth to develop themselves and learn a language – through languages they share their ideas.”
The young women were able to get their project going with the help of USAid and Crystal, a microfinance company based in Georgia. Starting from humble beginnings itself – a group of university friends who got together around 20 years ago – the company now has 70,000 clients across Georgia and manages a loan portfolio of up to $100m (£71.6m).
Crystal aims to support small entrepreneurs and farmers across the state through grant funding and loans. “Crystal helped us financially and gave advice,” says Rena, who was also mentored by the company and took part in its programme to build youth entrepreneurial skills and employability. Without this help, she believes she wouldn’t have been able to start Lingua.
“By supporting youth we say yes to minorities, yes to youth – especially to girls in male-dominated communities, and yes to empowering them. We do it with small financial and mentoring support, with small steps, but towards big dreams,” says Maya Kobalia, environmental and social officer at Crystal.
Crystal is a company intertwined with Georgia’s tumultuous history. Its roots go back to 1995, when Georgia was still recovering from the coup following independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. An estimated 260,000 internally displaced people were also forced to flee the Abkhazia and South Ossetia territories during armed conflicts in the early 1990s.
Archil Bakuradze, founder and executive chairman of Crystal, was an internally displaced person studying agriculture at university in Georgia in the early 1990s. It was a difficult time for the country, which was embroiled in a bitter civil war until 1995, so Bakuradze got together with a group of fellow students and internally displaced people to develop non-profit projects to help internally displaced children.
Bakuradze decided that they needed to do something entrepreneurial – he took the view that business can empower people and could help rebuild Georgia. Starting as a non-profit lending organisation, with only $10,000 lending capital to its name, Crystal became a company in 2004 and is now a leading microfinance institution in Georgia.
“We took a business direction and started borrowing money from commercial banks to lend to our customers. Many people felt we were crazy because we were doing it for low-income people. But we did our job and grew significantly,” says Bakuradze.
Crystal sees itself as a “platform for development”. Primarily a financial provider, it provides business loans for operating capital, and also loans for household solutions – a refrigerator, or washing machine, for example.
“What Georgian SMEs lack is not really money, it’s a spark, motivation, a bit of direction,” says Bakuradze. “It’s a post-Soviet country and Soviet systems tend to kill initiative. A lot of people in Georgia think like this, and we believe we are changing this with our clients.”
Irine Khetsuriani is another one of Crystal’s clients. The 36-year-old was able to start two women’s clothing shops in her home town of Kutaisi in western Georgia. Previously, she had been refused by banks because she had no collateral or monthly wages – Crystal was the only financial company that trusted her, she says.
“The impact is unexplainable with words, because it gave me self-confidence and trust that I could do something. Now my family of six depends on the income from the two shops that I have opened,” says Khetsuriani.
“We see that people start with very little they can risk, and they come for one loan, a second loan and they can grow. To realise that you’re part of that development is very rewarding, and something we want to generate on a much bigger scale,” says Bakuradze.
Crystal now has different social projects including youth empowerment schemes and schemes to support disabled people. The company says it stays true to its aim to support those on low incomes and in poverty, because “our life experiences very much shape the way we think,” says Bakuradze. “We have empathy for people because we were in that situation ourselves.”
