Street UK - Lessons Learned From Its First Three Years' Operations

Street UK is a non government organization working to support low income self employed people and owners of small businesses in the United Kingdom through the provision of microfinance/microcredit. This paper sets out the experiences of Street UK in terms of:

Constraints:

• Solutions and plans to overcome these constraints;
• Areas where policy changes are required for microentrepreneurs and community development financial institutions;
• Knowledge gap for further research.

The paper goes on to discuss the following:

• Lessons learnt and the nature of requirements of microentrepreneurs;
• Products and services outlining financial and business support services to meet the gap;
• Key elements of loan and business support for UK market microentrepreneurs;
• Organizational development issues facing microentrepreneurs;
• Perspective on most appropriate funding support, and terms and conditions of the support;
• Policy and regulatory changes needed to overcome the current hurdles and providing solutions.

The paper concludes by highlighting some of the key areas which need to be researched:

• Generic category, i.e. whether they are related to business development aspects of microenterprise or to the financial services issues;
• Perspective category, including size, nature of client market, creating tailored products and services, organizational development, regulatory issues and impact assessment.