Loans to women entrepreneurs in Estonia

Estonia’s Optiva Bank’s senior analyst Jelena Hlebnikova finds that NIB’s women’s facility, agreed with Optiva in early 2000, ties in very well with the bank’s product range. When the bank announced the new women’s credit, the switchboard was jammed by incoming calls from women entrepreneurs wanting to know more.
Optiva treats the women’s credits like any other ordinary loans, the criteria being exactly the same in both cases. As Jelena Hlebnikova puts it:

“The businesses chosen must have profitable operations and their documents must be in good order.”

During the spring Optiva Bank granted 14 credits under the women’s facility for a total of EEK 3.5 million (EUR 0.22 million). Lending amounts range between EEK 100,000 and 200,000.

Optiva Bank’s female borrowers are to a great extent employed in the service sector. Often this means beauty parlours or ladies’ hairdressing, but pharmacies and building materials retailers are also represented.

Optiva Bank is very pleased with the new customer category. Jelena Hlebnikova sums up by saying: “Our female borrowers are often experienced entrepreneurs who fight shy of excessive risk exposure. Generally speaking they are very solid business people indeed.”

Daam Koolitus—training tour leaders

During the short time they can spare for chatting with us, there is no mistaking the enthusiasm and go-ahead spirit of Inga Jagodkina and Reet Kivi. Between them they represent a completely new line of business in Estonia initially started by Marina Laikjõe.

The country’s tour leaders have no knowledge of destinations and customer service, and Daam Koolitus is the name of a tour leader training centre (and a travel agency, as well), which has been established in Tallinn to remedy this deficiency.

The Optiva Bank credit is the company’s first and is being used to fit out new training premises. Marina Laikjõe initially comes from Tartu, where she started a travel agency six years ago. During the journeys—mainly to Paris, Egypt and Hawaii—she noticed that many of the Estonian couriers she engaged had a poor knowledge of basics. She wanted to give her package customers a better deal, but there were no tour leaders who really knew the meaning of personal service.

Marina Laikjõe focused all forces to form RRA, “the Training Centre for Tour Leaders and Recreation”.

The first course, advertised last spring, attracted 250 applicants, of whom only 30 could be admitted. During the next training period, which totals 300 hours of lectures, the participants will among other things learn about customer service, the culture of different countries and any amount of facts about travel destinations, as well as first aid, group psychology and ecology.

The next project the ladies have in mind is the training of tour leaders for Russian-speaking groups.