Skip to main content
Let's Talk
RECOVERY LENDING

When everything is lost, the last thing people need is to wait.

Restoring dignity and agency through shock-responsive finance.
W258-0092-035
Disaster-Microfinance

The Day After the Disaster

When disaster strikes, families and small businesses can lose their livelihoods overnight. While humanitarian aid provides critical food and shelter, it rarely offers the capital needed to buy new seeds, repair a storefront, or replace equipment.

Worse, traditional banks often freeze lending due to the increased risk just when communities need capital the most. Without it, recovery stalls, deepening economic hardship and prolonging dependence on aid.

OUR APPROACH

A Lifeline Designed for Crisis

We refuse to pull back when our clients need us most. We designed Recovery Lending to bridge the critical gap between emergency relief and long-term independence, empowering survivors to become the architects of their own recovery.

Rapid, Rooted Deployment

We don't have to build new networks in a crisis; we are already there. By leveraging our established local financial institutions, we can inject capital into devastated communities within days, not months.

W259-0405-051 (1) (1)
VFI-and-WV-Staff-reduced-1

Compassionate, Flexible Terms

Recovery capital must reflect the reality on the ground. We provide affordable loans with built-in grace periods and adapted repayment schedules, giving families the breathing room they need to stabilize their lives first.

Collective Resilience

Rebuilding a local economy requires a community effort. We deploy capital to individual households, micro-enterprises, and established savings groups, ensuring that the entire financial ecosystem recovers together.

WhatsApp Image 2023-10-30 at 12.09.29 (2)
ARDIS
Climate protection built into finance

To make recovery lending possible at scale, we launched the African and Asian Resilience in Disaster Insurance Scheme (ARDIS) in 2018. It is one of the pioneering climate-risk programmes and the world’s largest non-governmental climate-insurance initiative. ARDIS ensures that when major climate events strike, funding is automatically unlocked—without waiting for lengthy loss assessments.

Here’s how it works:

ok-Daw-Mar-Mar-Aye_VFM_Hpa-An-Branch_Individual-Loan_13
W335-0035-012_Medium_res
Mongolia farming

Climate-triggered credit

When a disaster reaches a defined severity level, pre-arranged credit becomes available at pre-disaster interest rates. This allows microfinance institutions to continue lending immediately—at the moment clients need it most.

Capital protection

A climate-linked payout provides additional capital and operational support, enabling recovery loans to be issued without destabilising local institutions.

Smart climate data

Advanced climate indexes help anticipate drought, floods, and windstorms—informing smarter lending decisions before and after disasters.

BY THE NUMBERS

Resilience in the Face of Challenge

Time and again, our clients prove that when given the right tools, their capacity to rebuild is limitless.
W259-0505-002

Myanmar Earthquake (2025)

Capital deployed within the first week.

$1M+

disbursed in six months

11,000+

livelihoods restored

90%

of borrowers were women

+99%

repayment rate, even through crisis

W345-0327-015

East & Southern Africa Drought (2015–2016)

Targeted financial intervention during a catastrophic El Niño drought.

14,500

borrowers secured the capital needed to save their farms and small businesses

80,000

community members from extreme economic fallout

W310-0037-007.JPG_499050

Philippines Typhoon Haiyan (2013–2014)

A rapid financial lifeline following one of the strongest super typhoons in history.

4,900

clients successfully rebuilt their homes and businesses

+95%

repayment rate, even through crisis

Rebuilding Futures

Humanitarian aid saves lives. Recovery Lending gives those lives somewhere to go.

When capital reaches people in the days after disaster — not months — they stop waiting for recovery to happen to them. They become the ones making it happen.

Recovery isn't something that happens to people. It's something people do when given the chance.

We exist to make sure that chance exists.

D385-0338-335-2

We’re putting the power of climate resilience back into their hands.

Get In Touch

Get Our Newsletter