Taking the Next Step

It’s hard to define the entrepreneurial spirit. For some, there’s a subtle feeling that it’s time for a change. For others? A nagging internal itch that can only be scratched by building something of their own. Whatever that spirit is, Fatima Kamel Metayrik has been carrying it around for a long time. After three years of working for someone else, she answered the call and started her own business, which she manages part-time.

It has been four years since she took that daunting, all-important first step, and she’s still working her fulltime job, too. But maybe not for long with help from a financial partner who has been at her side since Fatima was at university.

Fatima has garnered plenty of experience when it comes to financing her way through life. Lacking enough money for university, she signed for and paid off two different loans, forging an educational path that led to her master’s degree. Now she works fulltime as a graphic designer at a reputable company, and it was there she decided to take another solitary step and found her own firm. Since she had already repaid a pair of loans, she qualified for a third, working capital to help her and a partner start a company that designs and makes decorative glass. This is the job she is striving to develop so it can become her main source of income, sooner rather than later.

At every important financial crossroads of Fatima’s journey, Al Majmoua has been there to help. Originally created by the Save the Children foundation in 1994 as a microfinance program to provide group loans to low-income women entrepreneurs, it became an independent institution in 1998. As Fatima’s backer, supporter, advisor, and funding source, Al Majmoua not only supplied the first three loans, it’s ready to offer another for equipment expected to make Fatima’s glass design company more profitable by letting her the expand and open a shop for her glass handicrafts. This way, she can once again scratch that entrepreneurial itch which keeps driving her forward.