About CHF

CHF - Cooperative Housing Foundation and currently known as CHF International - was founded back in 1952. Its goal is to empower more than 20 million people to improve their lives and livelihoods each year.

 

Within the framework of their contributions to making a positive developmental impact in Egypt, the CHF Management and Consulting Services S.A.E came along to support local currency loans to SMEs and MFIs that lend to micro-borrowers in different sectors. The CHF Management and Consulting Services are Egypt’s Loan Guarantee Facility, funded by OPIC. It exists for a better future for small and medium enterprises, microfinance institutions, non-banking financial institutions, and other approved borrowers.

Skills Bank Contribution

In August 2019, Skills Bank collaborated with the CHF Management and Consulting Services to provide an impactful training program for Egyptian female entrepreneurs on “Financial Literacy and Banking Knowledge''. 450 females who own or manage MSMEs from different governments around Egypt were selected based on CHF’s criteria. The Skills Bank LD team designed the program to help participants gain the needed finance knowledge to successfully run their business and generate profit without having work experience or academic background in finance. 

The Challenge!

We were successfully running an offline round with 25 participants each month, starting from August 2019. Everything was going smoothly and on schedule with satisfying feedback that kept us actively going. We were already done with many rounds until a crisis came along in February 2020.

 

Coronavirus hits, and we still have seven more rounds left. Offline training became impossible, and that was when we needed to quickly and efficiently reshape the learning experience. Being well-trained in crisis management and able to cope with change promptly, our team successfully transferred the whole training program from offline to virtual without compromising the quality of the training experience or participants’ convenience.

 

Besides adjusting the timeframe to be more convenient to the nature of the virtual training learning experience, our team went the extra mile to onboard our participants to use the virtual learning platform smoothly. After making sure everyone felt at ease and testing their interactive levels while using the platform, everything was set to efficiently continue the program with the same quality and interactive levels as the offline one. From February 2020 to December 2020, Skills Bank successfully trained 450 Egyptian female entrepreneurs who were ready to get going with their businesses after the rounds smoothly.